Foreign Devils (31 page)

‘Yes, sifu.’ And it did. Sometimes, when the common speech failed him, you had to see between the words.

We Rumans walked back in silence. The village leaders were gregarious and chatty, seemingly buoyed by the rice wine and the success of their offering. When the road entered Uxi, most of our Tchinee companions peeled away from the group, waving goodbyes and calling out indecipherable farewells. In the square, there was considerable confusion. The women who had been in distress before were now possessed by a terrible and violent outrage. A great pushing and pulling mob had formed, blocking the way back to the Uxi Bund where our pleasure barge awaited. We passed through, warily, and when we approached the Bund a great hue and cry sounded from behind us and the figure of a boy raced down the street. The lad was in that awkward phase of development when his body had suddenly stretched on entering puberty, and all his limbs were long, his joints knobby, yet very thin. As Father might say, ‘the lad’s balls had dropped’ but not by very much. He had a curly head of hair – exceedingly rare among the Kithai I’d seen – and he was smooth of skin and clean of face.

Except for the blood. A brilliant gash traced its way from his temple down his jawline. Blood discoloured his tunic, which appeared to be silk and fine, though now ruined. His mouth, smeared with blood, was open in a black hole of terror or alarm, his eyes wild.

Behind him came the mob, tossing rocks, flagstones, ceramic vessels, all clattering to the cobblestones or shattering on the walls of the buildings surrounding us. They chanted a phrase over and over again. ‘Chiang-shih!
Chiang-shih!
’

A metal brace or lead pipe whanged off the back of his head and he went stumbling, pitching forward onto his face and falling in a jumble of gawky limbs.

I reacted without thinking, that is clear. Holding my belly, I ran as swiftly as I could to interpose myself between the boy and the mad crowd of women. Carnelia cried out, behind me. I felt some thrown thing smash into my shoulder. A rock caught me on my brow, rocking my head back. But I was incensed and furious and felt no pain. This invulnerable fervour had overtaken me though my sister tells me my hands never stopped cradling of my stomach. I stood over the boy.

The women – pressed together in a clutch – stopped in the street, surprised to find a foreign devil between them and their prey. They chattered and screamed in fierce voices and I watched as the short-lived expression of surprise on the lead woman’s face was soon replaced with rage and she raised the rock she held in her hand and chucked the damned thing at me.

Then Huáng was there, a naked blade in one hand, its sheath in the other, his white hair in a wild clot around his head. He yelled, giving one tremendous bellow that echoed off the walls. The mob stepped backward. Huáng, looking relaxed, stepped forward.

Grabbing the boy’s arms, I helped him to his feet. Lupina was there, then, scowling, and helping me, with Carnelia not far behind. We retreated, toward the Bund and our awaiting barge.

Looking back, I saw the mob had recovered from Huáng’s magical bellow. One woman shied a rock at Huáng, who neatly side-stepped it. A large woman with a cleaver advanced, urging her companions to accompany her.

In a quick movement that seemed so simple it barely registered on my eye, Sun Huáng severed the cleaver and the hand that held it. The woman’s mouth opened and closed, soundlessly, like a fish’s plucked from a stream. The crowd became quiet.

Huáng said something in a low voice, the now bloodied sword held loosely before him.

Another rock was tossed, and it clattered onto the stones to the left of Huáng, but the mob had lost the fervour or madness that gave it cohesion. The burly woman whose hand had been chopped off emitted a high-pitched keening, gripping her stump, which gouted blood. With dark looks the women of Uxi village began to retreat and disperse.

‘Come,’ Huáng said, backing away, sword still in hand. ‘To the Bund. Now.’

With Lupina at my side and both of us taking one of the boy’s arms, we made our way back to the barge and in moments were steaming down the muddy river back to Jiang.

‘What in the blazing Hells were you doing, sissy?’ Carnelia asked once we were back on the barge. ‘You’re pregnant! There’s more to think about than yourself!’

Carnelia was furious, face flushed, waving her hands madly about.

‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I said. ‘Sometimes that happens.’

‘I can’t
believe
you!’ she said. Secundus and Tenebrae watched on, content, seemingly, to allow my sister to harangue me. Lupina, who tended to the gash on the boy’s forehead, frowned at me and nodded as Carnelia spoke. Huáng, on boarding the barge, went to confer with his secretaries, who had remained behind. ‘You’re acting Ia-damned selfish!’

I tried to hide the smile but could not contain it. Carnelia forced me to sit and began daubing with a wetted handkerchief at the cut on my forehead where the rock had broken skin. There was some blood and a painful, swelling knot there – and my shoulder was sore – but for all that I felt remarkably well.

‘It’s not funny!’ Carnelia screeched. She extended an accusing finger and waved it right under my nose. ‘You are responsible for a baby! A Cornelian! Father would be so … so …’

‘Angry?’

‘Fucking livid, that’s what. Stop grinning!’

‘It’s just I’ve never seen you like this, ’Nelia.’

‘Well,’ Carnelia bit her lip. ‘Get used to it. Especially when you act like a lunatic. Who here is supposed to take care of you when you do stupid things?’

‘Huáng didn’t seem to have any trouble,’ Secundus said, placing a hand on Carnelia’s shoulder. ‘No harm came of the incident, sister. And Livia has always gone her own way—’

‘She’s got a
passenger
now, brother,’ Carnelia said, putting all the scorn she could in her voice. ‘She can’t be foolish and think it will
only
affect her.’

‘You’re right, sissy. I will be more careful.’

‘Bloody right you will,’ she said, huffing and blowing back the hair from her eyes. But her next words were softer. ‘You could’ve been seriously injured, not to mention the baby.’

‘I say,’ Tenebrae said. ‘I’m not sure she was ever in any real danger. Did you see Huáng? Ia’s balls! How he moved! I was a fool ever to challenge him.’

‘Yes, you were,’ Carnelia said. ‘But we knew that beforehand.’

Tenebrae and Secundus laughed, in the easy camaraderie reserved for those who share a common pursuit. For a while they discussed Huáng, the profound brilliance of his swordplay and martial prowess, until the man himself returned.

‘Let us speak with this outcast,’ he said, looking toward the boy who lay quietly on one of the barge’s padded benches as Lupina tended to his wounds.

Huáng stood over the boy – young man, really, but he had an unblemished innocence about him. Looking at him critically, Huáng let loose an explosion of words that I could not understand. Secundus and Tenebrae looked at each other with incomprehension. Carnelia, hawkish and intense, only regarded the boy.

The boy said and did nothing, except blink. His large eyes were shuttered by eyelids ending in long lashes, giving him an almost Hellene sweetboy appearance. He remained mute, and looked upon us with wide eyes.

‘The boy seems simple,’ Tenebrae said. ‘Perhaps the stoning the women gave him knocked what little native intelligence he had out of his head.’

‘The question I want answered,’ said I, ‘is why were they stoning him in the first place?’

Carnelia cocked her head. ‘They were chanting something.’

‘Chiang-shih,’ Huáng said.

‘What is ‘
chiang-shih
’?’

Huáng took a deep breath and held it for a moment. He looked older now. He’d always seemed youthful, if wizened, but now he simply looked old, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes dashing away from what those eyes had seen over the course of his years.

‘A drinker of blood.’

‘What?’ Carnelia said, hands clutched before her. ‘A vorduluk?’

‘I do not know this word. A
chiang-shih
is a thing that consumes Qi – mostly in blood. But it will eat flesh if it must.’ He reached forward and touched the boy’s forehead, looking at the gash. ‘Other
chiang-shih
take the jing.’ He waved his hand negligently at his crotch. ‘The pearly essence. It is all Qi.’

‘These vorduluk take the lifeforce?’ I asked.

‘Yes. They take jing, which is of the body Qi. Does that make sense?’

‘Seems to,’ Secundus said, helping himself to the wine. Like our father, when the conversation became difficult, he would turn to wine for truth, or succour.

‘They are monsters of myth. Whenever something happens to a child in the villages, women cry
chiang-shih
,’ Huáng said. He looked at the boy closely. Reaching out, with one hand he took the boy’s chin, not roughly, and turned his head back and forth, and observing the lad’s face. The boy kept his mouth closed, and tight. ‘The women of Uxi were upset, but I fear the boy is the … focus? Yes, the focus of their discontent. I am doubtful that he is the cause.’

After a long while of peering at the lad intently, Huáng said, ‘For the time being, I will take him under my protection and he will be a companion of the Rumi. We have seen Madame Livia’s affinity for him. Is this acceptable?’

‘And when we are gone?’ I asked. ‘What will happen to the boy?’

Huáng considered the question. After a pause, he said, ‘I cannot tell what native abilities or talents the boy might possess, other than that of angering village women. Let us have our company, and us his, and decide together. Possibly, he could make a page for you, Secundus, or become a Praetorian, Mister Shadow.’

‘Or find some sort of employ with you, Sun Huáng. We two saved him. I won’t allow him to be cast aside.’ These strange maternal instincts had been stirred in me.

‘Yes. Let us see what abilities and Qi he possesses.’

‘Curious thing, this Qi,’ said Tenebrae, the issue of the boy settled. ‘We seem to encounter it quite a bit in conversation without having a full understanding of it. Is there some book or treatise … a pamphlet even … that has more information on it in the written language of Latinum?’

Huáng nodded. ‘While Min was in Rume, I instructed her to transcribe the—’ His brow furrowed and a lock of white hair fell. He brushed it back. ‘The title would be, roughly, ‘A History of Kithai.’ It was presented to Tamberlaine as a gift, with the double-headed concubine. It had a large section on Qi.’

‘I don’t imagine there’s any copies, then,’ Secundus said, mulling over a silver goblet of spiced white wine. He puckered his mouth as he sipped. ‘I will confer with my father via the Quotidian. It is possible we can have him – or one of his secretaries – give us the information regarding Qi on the Ides.’

‘I will instruct Min to provide another copy,’ Huáng said, frowning. ‘From her cloister.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ I said. A thought occurred to me. ‘The Qi. When we use these infernal devices … they take our Qi, is that correct?’

‘Your physical form of it. Your jing, if I’m not mistaken.’ He nodded his head. ‘I witnessed your Ruman Emperor Tamberlaine using one, once.’

‘And you said the Autumn Lords are “creatures of pure Qi”.’

Huáng nodded his snowy head.

‘And vorduluk, these ‘chiang-shih’ consume it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are these things connected?’

He smiled. ‘Qi is life. There are hungry ghosts. There are hungry men. Mothers that eat their young. It is a monster of a world that we live in and
we
become monsters to survive,’ he said. It all came out in a rush, so his pronunciation was terrible and, now, as I write it, I’m filling in where Huáng flubbed our words and declensions. But the sentiment was obvious.

‘I am trying to understand, yet sometimes it still seems like magic to me,’ Tenebrae said. ‘All this talk of Qi.’

‘Shut up, Shadow,’ Carnelia said. ‘Sifu is talking.’

Huáng smiled at Tenebrae. ‘You are Ruman, and it would take many sheaf of days to get you to lower your practical nature and embrace the idea of Qi.’

The boy sat up and looked about, blinking. He had huge eyes, for a young man, and almost preternaturally fair skin. Huáng beckoned a serving woman and set her to washing his face and hands, cleaning the wound on the back of his head. Interrupting her work, I probed at it with my fingers, delicately, and though it seemed much less of a wound than it appeared when he received it. The skin was barely broken.

The boy stared at me with wide, open eyes and lightly placed his hands on my stomach. He said nothing, made no noise.

‘I will make sure the boy is well, and safe, Livia,’ Huáng said, softly. ‘There is no worse thing than to be alone in the world.’

I didn’t truly understand why he said that, but my heart clutched, and I thought of Fisk, so far away. I did something then I had not done before. Many times, I had seen Carnelia, Secundus, and Tenebrae bow to Sun Huáng when entering the
armatura
pitch, and he would respond in kind. I, however, being a Cornelian, and emissary of Rume, have always felt that it was a sign of submission to do so and at least one of our party should remain unbowed. Yet here was this man, this old man, full of knowledge and wisdom, and who in all appearances had remained honest and true to our mission and cause. I felt a great warmth for him then, and I know not if it was the inner currents of my jing or Qi or whatever in my body – or young Fiscelion’s – but, rising, I bowed to Sun Huáng with as much respect as I could.

He returned the bow.

Again, I acted on impulse. I took his hand in mine, I kissed it. It had the liver spots that many aged have – my grandmother Livia, whose name I bear, always spoke of them as mistake marks, as if each big one, her first husband, her affairs, her second son, were writ upon flesh. Yet, taking his hand, looking at it, feeling the texture of his skin, the strength beneath, at that moment I found him beautiful, this withered bit of lightning made flesh. At first he was tense – this, I think was one physical interaction he was wholly unprepared for – and then he relaxed and I drew his hand to me. I placed it on my stomach, where the boy’s hand had just been. He laughed, a soft breathy sound, and said words I did not understand. For a while we stood there together, him feeling my stomach twitch and convulse. Young Fiscelion popped him a good one right in the palm and Huáng’s eyes widened and he laughed, a merry, musical laugh. When he did that the years on him fell away.