Hidden Cities (34 page)

Which made Chung smile when Shen laughed raspingly, before he rolled the paper into a twist around black powder to make another fuse.

Isolation draws men tight together, where it doesn’t tear them apart. No one had to stay, but few were leaving; the core of Chung’s little team was still those rebels who had surrendered to the emperor, unless it was to Yu Shan, unless it was to him.

Santung could not be defended, that was known. It was Chung’s task, almost his self-appointed task, to prove it untrue.

This steep-sided valley was his proving-ground. Water and mud and stone, river and rain and ruined paddy, broken walls and crumbling terraces: it was his entirely, while he learned the possibilities of what he had to play with.

If he succeeded, the world would call that his triumph, and be wrong.

This was his triumph, this man at his side who shared his hopes
and ideas, his failures and losses, his meals and his bedroll and his dreams.

W
HAT WAS
coming up the river now, that was a procession, almost a circus. Not a triumph.

Chung stood on the island’s downstream peak, below the bridge, with Shen beside him and his men packed close behind, all their attention on the succession of boats that rowed blazingly, blaringly against the current to come to them.

Chung had fireworks; the boats had trumpets. Again and again they sounded across the water, proclaiming all the yellow in the canopies and pennants, in the costumes of the men who rowed and the soldiers who stood on guard at prow and stern.

Privately, Chung thought there was perhaps a little too much yellow. After spending time at court, time with the emperor himself, a lot of time squatting in corners waiting for Mei Feng’s summons, he had some sense of propriety. A governor was the emperor’s representative, speaking with his voice and authority—but yellow was the emperor’s own color, which made it some kind of sacred, and a mortal man ought to be more careful.

A mortal man with only half an army, especially so, when he had enemies in the country all around.

Unless Chung could compensate for those absent soldiers and more. Rewrite the rules of war, almost. In his bleak times, untriumphant, he felt he was being asked to do just that.

And here came Ping Wen now, to review his progress.

He didn’t feel ready at all.

“You’re ready,” Shen murmured at his elbow. “We will show him wonders, you and I.”

“Well, not that,” Chung said. At the second attempt, touching dry lips with a dry tongue. “Something, though, at least we have something to show him.”

·  ·  ·

P
ING
W
EN
stepped ashore on the river’s bank, not on the island. Landing directly from a boat was always awkward, always graceless. All the traffic came and went by river now that the road was so chewed up and the slope above so dangerous, but almost always with this little hiatus, a step aside onto the bank and so over the bridge.

Or not. For most traffic, the step ashore was already too close to the foolhardy with their flashes and bangs and fires. Bundles and barrels could be left there on the bank, moorings hurriedly slipped and boats away on the rapid current.

Not today. Drums and trumpets and flags, and a slow assembly; Chung sent his men to their places, while he and Shen climbed to the high arch of the bridge.

They had discussed this, of course: how to greet the governor, what the protocols should be. Whether a governor ranked higher than a general, when both ranks dwelled in the same body.

They had discussed it and not agreed, could not agree. In the end Shen wouldn’t talk about it anymore, so Chung was stranded in his uncertainty.

In the end, now, he realized that he was going to do exactly as Shen did: which was no doubt exactly what Shen had wanted all along.

P
ING
W
EN
saw them waiting, and understood that to be for him; understood the ground they met on, the narrow span of it and all the uncertainty beneath; chose to leave his retinue and come alone up the steep boards of the bridge, to that apex where they stood.

Possibly he expected them to greet him on their knees, kowtowing, striking their heads off those same boards.

Possibly, then, he was disappointed. Shen stood erect and greeted him with a low and soldierly bow, an officer to his commander, no more than that. Chung had been a little distracted,
thinking that Ping Wen was quite definitely wearing too much yellow; there was hardly room for any color else.

But the emperor was far away, and this man held all the power of his office. Chung was only a fraction late in bowing; and then, wondering what next, he was delighted by his joy, his triumph, Shen.

Who paced slowly backward before the governor down the difficult slope of the bridge, drawing Chung along with him with not a touch, not a glance, only a perfect trust. So they became Ping Wen’s forerunners, his bannermen, while they remained still utterly in possession of what was theirs, like a gate closed against him: a gate that opened only at their own choosing, at the foot of the bridge, as they stepped one either side and bowed again, scrupulously low, not so much soldiers now as hosts welcoming a guest. At their invitation, on their sufferance.

P
ING
W
EN
must have hated that, and could speak not a word against it.

I
N HIS
train came functionaries and guards, but Ping Wen was all that mattered here. Ping Wen and his satisfaction. However much they might play with protocol and take advantage of any ambiguity, Chung really did want to keep what he had here. His little platoon, his machinery, his island. His fireworks. His Shen. His entire triumph, he wanted to preserve it all intact, and Ping Wen’s favor was his only means to do that.

Shen was ahead of him, literally at least: gesturing the governor toward the new machines, cautioning him away from black oil and powder, showing him prepared pots with their fuses. Explaining how the machines worked, with all their ropes and tethers. Wafting a hand at the men standing by, crews eager to work.

Casting a swift glance back at Chung,
this is your triumph, do you want me to steal it all?

It wasn’t stealing, if he made a gift of it.

Even so, Chung stepped forward to join them, to stand at Ping Wen’s other elbow and say, “We are ready to demonstrate what we’ve achieved, my lord governor.” Shen was calling him
my lord general;
it was almost wonderful how they made a matched pair, how they divided duties naturally between them. “Um, the process is not entirely without risk,” indeed the lord governor’s lordly yellow slippers were standing in a black stain on the rock that even scrubbing had not been able to shift, where an early experiment had gone catastrophically wrong and nearly killed them all. Who knew that a half-filled pot, a leaking pot would be more deadly than a full one? There seemed no reason to it. “It might be wiser for your excellence to remove to the farther end of the island,” beyond the stone bridge-footings, where his entourage awaited. “Or even perhaps to view from the bank?” Send him over the bridge, remove this tall watchful terrifying man from Chung’s territory altogether, let him not threaten the triumph …

“I am a soldier,” Ping Wen said, mildly aligning himself with Shen instead of Chung. “Where my men stand in danger, so do I.” Chung felt an urge to say
they are my men, or else we are all the emperor’s men, you too
—but fortunately he was not quite such a fool as that. Besides, Shen knew, and was frowning at him mightily. “I will watch from here, if I am not in the way of your work.”

No, no, they assured him, not in the way at all, if he would only take two paces backward, not to stand so exactly between the stack of projectiles and the flinging-arm of the first machine. They were only sorry, they said, that they couldn’t offer him a chair to sit on. As he could see, they were very barely furnished here. There were boxes, there were chests, there was perhaps a ridge of rock …?

A sharp clap of his hands summoned a functionary at an urgent anxious trot. A word sent the man back to the bridge. His own word had two soldiers racing over the water and back again in very short order, with a heavy ornate chair in gold and red lacquer slung between them.

A servant from the boat followed, with a cushion in his hands. That was … well, Chung supposed that the fabric could be said to be gold, though when the man set it down for Ping Wen it did look very yellow next to the actual gold of the chair’s embellishments.

If Ping Wen had ordered it made for himself—well. It was almost a declaration.

He directed the positioning of his chair, had it moved once because it was unsteady and a second time because he feared an obstructed view. Shen was the very image of respectful patience, a rock carved standing with his hands behind his back. Chung twitched and fidgeted, felt himself doing it, could do nothing to stop it. Not by himself. It needed Shen’s arm to reach out—a rock that moved, a miracle!—to take his wrist and grip it wordlessly. Shen’s own stillness crept into Chung from that touch, and lingered even after Shen’s hand retreated behind his back again.

They waited, then, side by side until the governor was settled and content. At his nod, Shen released Chung with a glance—
this is yours now, your achievement; show it off now, be triumphant—
and went himself to stand behind Ping Wen’s chair while Chung joined his men around the machine.

He didn’t really need to be there. The men had drilled and drilled for this, they knew exactly what they were to do. He wanted, though, to lay his own hands to the work. More, he wanted Shen—whose shoulder would not bear the weight of the work—to be the one who explained things to the governor, that soft insidious voice speaking soldier to soldier.

He couldn’t have that, it seemed. Shen stood mute: of malice, he was sure. Ping Wen waited inquiringly until Chung had to lift his head, lift his voice, almost shout to be sure his words would carry:

“Tunghai Wang built machines like this, and set them here. They flung pots across the water, filled with a liquid that caught fire when they struck and broke. Like this …”

A nod to his men and they went into action, drawing down the flinging-arm and loading its basket, standing to the ropes when all was ready. Chung himself touched the smoking end of a slow-match to the pot’s fuse. “Fling!”

Ping Wen already knew everything that Chung had told him; and he knew most of what was to come, or else he himself would not have come this far to see it. One did not surprise the great. Besides, Ping Wen had no doubt seen such war-machines before. Used them, very likely. He had been a genuine soldier under the old emperor.

The men heaved, the long arm hurled upward, the pot flew from its basket and seemed almost to hang in the air for a moment at the top of its arc, black and strange, before it crashed down to earth. They always did that.

They didn’t always land quite where Chung intended. It was nothing but relief to see the projectile strike rock, rather than splash into the water; relief again when it functioned perfectly, breaking apart and giving Ping Wen a moment’s clear view of its viscous black contents before the eruption of bright flame.

Chung let the governor watch for a minute how the flame clung, how it burned rock and mud together.

Then he explained—swiftly and concisely, because he had practiced this as much as the men had practiced pulling ropes—how he revised the missiles to make them explode in mid-air. For demonstration, they loaded the same machine and shifted its aim farther along the riverbank, to where a makeshift cluster of head-high poles and taut-stretched banners stood in for enemy soldiers.

“Fling!”

Nothing could go wrong today. It was his triumph. The projectile rose, and hung, and fell; the flame ate down the shorter fuse and licked in through the touch-hole; there was a flash too bright—too yellow, they were all usurping the emperor’s prerogative today—for the sun to drown it, a bang that was frightening even at this distance, even to those who were waiting for it.

When the smoke cleared, Ping Wen could see exactly what Chung had hoped for, poles ripped from the ground and banners shredded, everything on fire.

“That was a lucky shot,” he called to the governor, disarmingly confessional. “They don’t always explode at exactly the right time; they don’t always reach the distance. But if an army marched along this road, we could sit here in safety and promise to destroy it.”

That was an opening, an obvious flaw. He left it open deliberately, like a gate; the governor obligingly stepped through it.

“This valley is not the only way to approach the city; that road—what is left of that road—is not the only way to pass this valley.”

“Indeed, your excellence. If the army marched along the ridge up there, we could not fling our pots that high. If we stood on the same ground as the enemy, we could destroy the front ranks of a charge, but the reach of this machine is just too short; by the time we had reloaded, the ranks behind would have swamped us. What we needed was greater range.

“A pot that rose higher would fall farther off, but the oil used by Tunghai Wang,” picking up a little jar of it and tipping, pouring a thin stream carefully into another jar, treating it with due respect even while he disparaged it, “is too heavy for a machine like this to fling high or far. In the same warehouse, though, we found many of the powders used for fireworks; and in your service in Santung we found artificers who used to design and make fireworks for imperial celebrations. We brought them here,” the last crucial ingredient in his little team, “and they worked on the canisters while we, Shen and I worked on the machine itself.” While they made one entirely new, indeed, with a longer arm and longer ropes, and no simple basket at the flinging-end but a complex sling of rope and net to extend its reach farther yet, to flick like a whip and so send the missile hurtling on its way.

First—purely for comparative purposes, and not at all because
he was a showman, no—he demonstrated how far the old machine could throw a powder-projectile: not really halfway up the steep slope of the valley’s side, but close enough that he could call it so. And the blessed thing exploded just as it ought, in a fierce sheet of flame: did he have the Li-goddess at his back, had he fetched her here from Taishu on the wings of his wishing, to have this perfect day fall into place about him …?