In the Balance (23 page)

Yi Min yelled, “Help me, someone! I haven’t done a thing. Save me from the terrible devils!” Liu Han snorted angrily and glowered at his back. He didn’t care what happened to anyone else, so long as he saved his own worthless skin. She snorted again. It wasn’t as if she didn’t already know that.

Despite his bawling like a pig with a cut hock, no one did anything foolish, for which Liu Han was heartily glad. But she felt very lonely as the armed escort of devils led her out of the prison camp, away from her own people, and toward a dragonfly plane. “In!” Ssofeg said. Having no choice, first Yi Min and then Liu Han obeyed.

A few minutes later, the dragonfly plane scrambled noisily into the air. Even though her stomach lurched every time the plane changed direction, she wasn’t as completely petrified as she had been the first time the little scaly devils forced her aboard one of their flying machines. After all, several of them were in here, too, and no matter how little they cared about her, she’d seen that they valued their own painted hides.

“This is all your fault!” Yi Min shouted at her. “If you weren’t flaunting yourself there in my tent, I never would have gotten into this predicament.”

The unfairness of that took her breath away. Before she could answer, one of the devils let out an ominous hiss. It punctured the apothecary’s
bluster like a pin popping an inflated sow’s bladder. He shut up, though he didn’t stop glaring at her. She glared right back.

After about half an hour’s flight, the dragonfly plane set down not far from some much bigger machines of the scaly devils. The devils, with guns urged her and Yi Min out, marched them along to one of those big machines, and up a ladder into its belly. Unlike the ones on the dragonfly plane, the seats in there were padded, though still not big enough eyen for her.

These seats had straps, too. A little devil waiting for them fastened those straps so Liu Han could not reach the buckles no matter how she squirmed. Her fear came back. Yi Min writhed even more violently than he had under her. Here, though, his thrashing won no release.

The door to the outside world slammed shut. The devil twisted a handle to make sure it stayed that way. Then he scrambled up an interior ladder into a higher room, leaving the two people alone and helpless.

“Your fault,” Yi Min insisted. He went on in that vein for some time. Liu Han stopped listening to him. Nothing, obviously, had ever been his fault in all his born days, and if you didn’t believe it, you had but to ask him.

Without warning, the machine shuddered beneath them. “Earthquake,” Liu Han squalled. “We’ll be crushed, we’ll be killed—” She’d never heard anything like the roar that went with the terrible, unending shaking.

Without warning, she felt as if two or three people—or maybe a brick wall, knocked down by the earthquake—had fallen on top of her. She tried to scream, but produced no more than a gurgle; the dreadful, unending weight made it hard to breathe at all, let alone drag in enough air for a shriek. After a little while, much of the racket went away, though a more muted rumble and several medium-loud mechanical noises persisted.

“What’s happening to us, Yi Min?” Liu Han gasped out. However much she disliked him, he was the only other human being caught in this devilish trap. Besides, with his education, he might even have known the answer.

“I have ridden on the railroad,” he replied, his voice also coming forth in effortful grunts. “When a train starts to move, it presses you back into your seat. But—never like this.”

“No, never like this. This is no train,” Liu Han said scornfully. His words satisfied her no better than his body had.

The rumble from beneath them abruptly cut off. At the same instant, the crushing pressure on Liu Han’s chest also went away. Her own weight somehow seemed to disappear, too. Were it not for the prisoning straps that grasped her, she felt as if she could have floated away from her seat, perhaps even flown like a magpie. Exhilaration she’d never known flooded through her. “It’s wonderful,” she exclaimed.

The only answer Yi Min gave was a sick, gulping noise that reminded her of a fish trying to breathe after it was hauled out of its pond. She twisted her neck so she could look over at him. His face was pale as whey. “I will not vomit,” he whispered fiercely, as if trying to make himself believe it. “I will not vomit.”

Big drops of sweat grew on his cheeks and forehead. He shuddered, still fighting to control his rebellious stomach. Liu Han watched, fascinated, as one of the drops broke free. It didn’t fall. It just hung almost motionless in midair, as if hooked to the ceiling with an invisible line of spider silk. But no, no silk here.

Yi Min let out another gulp, this one louder than the last. All at once, Liu Han hoped he would not be sick. If his vomit hung as the drop of sweat had, it was liable to smother him—and if it drifted through the air, it was liable to smother her.

Then the apothecary quavered, “L-look at the devil, Liu Han.”

Liu Han turned back toward the ladder up which the little scaly devil had climbed. He was there in the hatchway again, peering down at the two humans with his unnerving, independently mobile eyes. But those eyes, at the moment, were the least unnerving thing about him. He floated head-down, a couple of yards above Liu Han, with neither hands nor feet holding onto anything. He did not fall, any more than the drop of Yi Min’s sweat had.

When he saw that the people could not escape, he twisted in midair so his legs were toward them. The practiced maneuver might have been part of a dance in three dimensions; for the first time, Liu Han found a devil graceful. He reached out, grabbed a rung of the ladder, pushed. Sure enough, just as Liu Han had imagined, he flew upward into his own cabin.

“Isn’t that the most amazing thing you ever saw?” she said.

“It’s impossible,” Yi Min declared.

“Who knows what’s impossible for devils?” Liu Han asked. Through his sickness, Yi Min stared at her. She needed a moment to read the expression on his face. Then she realized that without thinking about it, she had spoken to him as to an equal. That was not proper, but it was the truth; here, caught by the devils’ cords, they were equals, equal, nothings. And of the two of them, she was having the better time of coping with this strange
(she
would not say impossible) place.

If Yi Min had reprimanded her, shoved her, back down into the subservient role she’d taken all her life, likely she would have accepted it without a murmur. But he didn’t; he was too filled with his own nausea, too filled with his own fear. Because of that, some things—not everything, but some things—changed forever between them in the next few silent minutes.

She didn’t know how long they traveled with their weight left behind. She enjoyed every second of it, and wished only that she were free to float about and try the twisting move the little scaly devil had used. Yi Min lay huddled on his seat. Every so often, he made another sick gulping noise. Liu Han did her best not to laugh at him.

The plane in which they were flying made noises of its own. The pops and hisses meant nothing to Liu Han, so she hardly noticed them. But the metallic bangs and the grating sound that came from the front end after a while were impossible to ignore. She said, “Are we going to crash?”

“How should I know?” Yi Min answered peevishly, diminishing himself in her sight yet again.

They did not crash. More strange noises came from the front end of the plane, then the harsh sounds of the little scaly devils’ speech. Three devils came floating back into the compartment where Liu Han was strapped down, though she had not known the plane held more than one. Her fear came back with them, for two of the devils bore long knives that were almost swords. She’d imagined Yi Min’s vomit drifting through the air like stinking fog. Now in her mind’s eye she saw a red mist of her own blood filling the room. She shuddered and tried to make herself as small as she could.

The devil with a sword-knife glided down to the seat on which she lay, reached out. She shuddered again. A thousand times better Yi Min’s caresses than the touch of the scaly devil. But all he did was unfasten the straps that held her in place, then those confining the apothecary. When they were both free, the devil pointed upward, in the direction from which he and his companions had come.

All at once, in an almost blinding flash of enlightenment, Liu Han saw that the armed devils were there to protect the other one from her and from Yi Min. Just as it hadn’t occurred to her that she could talk back to Yi Min, so she hadn’t imagined mere humans might be dangerous to devils. Again something changed for good in the way she looked at the world.

Yi Min spoke hesitantly in the devils’ language. The one who had released him answered. “What does he say?” Liu Han asked; her tone said she had a right to know.

“He’s telling us to go that way,” Yi Min replied, pointing in the same direction the little devil had. “He says they will not hurt us if we do as they say.”

Liu Han pushed against the arms of her seat. She floated up, lighter than a feather. The scaly devil did grab her, but only to straighten her course. Yi Min followed, still making queasy noises in the back of his throat.

The room from which the devils had come was smaller than the one in which they’d confined the humans. One wall was nothing but dials and buttons and screens. A scaly devil with a short sword floated in front of it. He
hissed at Liu Han, as if warning her to come no closer. She wanted to laugh at him—she had no intention of doing that.

The devil’s small, skinny body did not cover all the screens. One showed cloud-covered blue and brown slowly moving past, as if seen from far above. The pretty colors had a sharp, curved edge; above was only black: “Look, Yi Min,” Liu Han said. “They can make pretty pictures. I wonder what it is.”

Yi Min looked at the screen, pointed to it, tried out his small command of the devils’ tongue on the one guarding it. That one answered at some length, Yi Min interrupting a couple of times with new questions. The apothecary said, “That’s our world going round many miles below us, Liu Han, our whole world. The Western devils with whom I studied were right, it seems—the world really is round like a ball.”

Liu Han kept her own opinion of that to herself. The world had always looked flat to her. But it certainly did seem to have a round edge now. Now was not the time to worry about it, not with so many more urgent concerns closer to hand.

The scaly devil hissed and pointed with his blade, urging her forward. She grabbed what had to be a handhold and went through another opening. Two more armed devils waited in the much bigger space out there. They pointed to an open circular doorway in the curved wall of that space. Liu Han obediently propelled herself toward it. It had handholds all around, for those whose aim was poor.

Hers wasn’t. She almost collided with the devil waiting inside that tunnel. Yi Min missed the doorway and had to scrabble in with the handholds. He was nursing a sprained wrist and cursing under his breath when he appeared. The two floating devils followed him.

The trip along that corridor was the strangest journey Liu Han had ever known, even surpassing the weightless flight in the roaring plane. With every foot she traveled away from the door way, she grew heavier. From floating, she went to bounding, then to walking with long strides, then to ordinary steps with what felt like about her proper weight.

“How do they do that?” she asked Yi Min; he was, after all, the only other person available, and could also talk with the devils, which she could not—although, now that she thought about it, what held her back from learning their words for herself?

He spoke, listened, spoke, listened, finally gave up. “I do not understand. It has something to do with spinning round and round, but how could that make us heavier or lighter?” He wiped his sweaty forehead with a sleeve. “It’s too hot in here, too.”

“It certainly is,” Liu Han said. It was as bad as any midsummer day, though less humid than usual in her village in summer. That helped, but not
enough. The devils seemed perfectly happy in the heat. She remembered how warm the mat on which the devil was sitting had felt, just a few hours before. And the Christian priest, she recalled, had said devils lived in a hot place. She hadn’t taken him seriously, but he must have known what he was talking about. Maybe, being a Western devil himself, he’d had more intimate acquaintance with other sorts of devils than was possible for a Chinese.

The armed devils took the two humans out of the corridor and into another one. Other devils bustled past on errands of their own. Some of them turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han and Yi Min. Most just ignored the two people.

The escort led Liu Han and Yi Min into a large room. Already inside were several devils with fancier body paint than any Liu Han had yet seen and a mat covered not with cotton cloth but with some smooth shiny stuff, obviously of devilish manufacture. One of the waiting devils surprised Liu Han by speaking Chinese. What he said surprised her even more: “You two go screw now.”

She gaped at him, wondering if she’d heard correctly (his accent was dreadful) and whether he knew what he was saying. She knew a certain amount of relief to see that Yi Min looked as befuddled and as dismayed as she felt. To have endured both terror and wonder to get here, only to receive a blunt order to fornicate … She wondered about the little scaly devils in ways that had never occurred to her before.

“You go screw now,” the devil repeated.

“No,” she said, the word out of her mouth before she had time to wonder about its consequences.

And, “No,” Yi Min echoed, which surprised her very little. It was soon after he had taken her before, and he’d been through quite a lot since. Few men wanted to try when they weren’t likely to succeed.

“Not go screw, not leave,” the scaly devil said.

Liu Han and Yi Min stared at each other, appalled. No matter how interesting the journey hither had been, Liu Han did not want to spend the rest of her days in the company of devils and Yi Min. But she had no desire to exhibit herself to the devils either. “You are perverts if you think we will perform for you,” she burst out. “Go away and leave us alone; then we will see.”