The Concubine's Secret (5 page)

‘You bastard, Alexei, you’re enjoying this. Help me out here.’

‘
Nyet.’

‘Damn you.’

He’d smiled that infuriating smile of his and watched her make a mess of it again and again. It had been a lonely start for her, isolated by her lack of words, but now, though she hated to admit it, she realised he’d been right. She’d learned fast and now she enjoyed using the language her Russian mother had refused to teach her.

‘Russian?’ Valentina would say in their Chinese attic with a scowl on her beautiful fine-boned face, her dark eyes flashing with contempt. ‘What good is Russian now? Russia is finished. Look how those murdering Bolsheviks destroy my poor country and strip her naked. I tell you, malishka, forget Russia. English is the language of the future.’

Then she’d toss her long silky hair as if tossing all Russian words out of her head.

But now in a cold and smelly train rattling its way across the great flat plain of northern Russia towards Felanka, Lydia was cramming those words into her own head and listening to the woman opposite her asking, ‘What part of Russia do you hail from?’

‘I come from Smolensk,’ she lied and saw the woman nod, satisfied.

‘From Smolensk,’ she said again, and liked the sound of it.

China, 1930

The cave was cold. Cold enough to freeze the breath of the gods, yet too shallow to risk a fire. Chang An Lo had hunkered down in the entrance, still as one of the brittle grey rocks that littered the naked mountainside all around him. No movement. Nothing. Grey against the unrelenting grey of the winter sky. But outside the cave a thin dusty crust of snow swirled off the frozen scree and formed stinging tumbles of ice in the air that clung to his eyelashes, and nicked the skin of his lips till they bled. He didn’t notice. Behind him water trickled down the lichen-draped walls, a whispery treacherous sound that seeped into his mind sharper than the cold.

Hold the mind firm.

Mao Tse Tung’s words. The powerful new leader who had wrenched control of the Chinese Communist Party for himself.

Chang blinked his eyes, freeing them from ice, and felt a rogue twist of anger in his guts.
Focus
. He fought to still his mind, to focus on what was to come. Let the gutter-licking grey dogs of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army learn what he had in store for them, discover what was waiting on the rail track in the valley below. Like an alligator waits in the great Yangtze River. Unseen. Unheard. Until its teeth tear you apart.

Chang moved, no more than the slightest flick of his gloved hand, but it was enough to draw a slender figure from the back of the hollow that the wind and rain had carved out of the rock. The figure, like Chang, wore a heavy cap and padded coat that robbed it of any shape, so only the soft voice in his ear indicated that his companion was female. She crouched beside him, her movements as fluid as water.

‘Are they coming?’ she whispered.

‘The snowdrifts across the valleys will have delayed the train. But yes, it’s coming.’

‘Can we be certain?’

‘Hold your mind firm,’ Chang echoed his leader’s words.

His sharp black eyes scanned the mountainous landscape around him. China was an unforgiving land, especially harsh on those who had to scrape a living up here from its bleak, treeless terrain, where the relentless winds from Siberia raked the surface free of soil like fingernails scraping dirt off the skin. Yet something about this place satisfied his soul, something hard and demanding; the mountains a symbol of stillness and balance.

Not like the soft humid breezes that he had grown used to in recent months down south in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi. That was where the Communist heartland lay. There in Mao Tse Tung’s own hideout near Nanchang, Chang had smelled a sticky sweetness in the air that turned his stomach. It was in the paddy fields. On the terraces. In the Communist training camps. That smell of corruption. Of a man crazed by power.

Chang had spoken to no one about his awareness of it, told none of his brother Communists of his sense that something at the heart of things wasn’t quite as it should be. They were all, himself included, willing to fight Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists and die for what they believed in, yet… Chang inhaled sharply. His friend, Li Ta-chao, had been dedicated to the cause and had died with his sixty comrades in the heart of Peking itself. Chang spat his disgust on to the barren rock. His friend had been betrayed. Executed by slow strangulation. There was nothing definite Chang could point to and say,
This is where the corruption lies
. Just an uneasy rustle in his soul. A cold wind that cut deep and made him wary.

It was certainly nothing he could mention to Kuan. He turned to her now and studied her intense young face with its straight brows and high, broad cheekbones. It wasn’t what any man would call a pretty face but it possessed a strength and determination that Chang cared for. And when she smiled – which was rare – it was as if some dark demon vanished from her spirit and let the light inside her glow bright as the morning sun.

‘Kuan,’ he murmured, ‘do you ever think about the lives we take when we commit ourselves to an action like this? About the parents bereaved? About the wives and children whose hearts will break when the knock comes to their door with the news?’

Her body shivered close beside his shoulder and she turned her head quickly to face him, the soft pads of her cheeks red with cold. But he could sense the shiver was not one of horror, could see it in her eyes, hear it in the shallow rhythm of her breathing. It was a shiver of excitement.

‘No, my friend, I don’t,’ she said. ‘You, Chang An Lo, are the one who planned this operation, who guided us here. We followed you, so surely you’re not…’ Her voice trailed away, unwilling to give life to the words.

‘No, I’m not altering my plan.’

‘Good. The train is coming, you say.’

‘Yes. Soon. And Chiang Kai-shek’s dung eaters deserve to die. They massacre our brothers with no hesitation.’

She nodded, a vehement jerk of her head, her breath coiling in the grey air.

‘We are at war,’ Chang said, his eyes on the gun at his belt. ‘People die.’

‘Yes, a war we will win so that Communism can bring justice and equality to the people of China.’ Up on the godforsaken icy mountain ledge, Kuan smiled at Chang and he felt the heat of it warm just the outer edge of the cold void that lay black and empty in the cavern of his chest.

‘Long live our great and wise leader, Mao,’ Kuan said urgently.

‘Long live our leader,’ Chang echoed.

The doubts were there in those four words. His own ears could hear the weakness in them, little worms of disbelief burrowing deep, but Kuan’s eyes sparkled with conviction, satisfied with his echo. Her neat little ears had not detected the worms.

Chang rose to his feet and drew a long slow breath, stilling the unsettled beat of his heart. In front of him the mountain fell away steeply to the narrow gulley below and rose again in a sheer bleak rock face on the opposite side. No villages or cart tracks or even wild goat trails in sight, just the empty treeless landscape strewn with rocks cocooned in ice, and the twin snakes of silver metal that cut through the base of the valley. The rail track.

For a brief moment he allowed himself to wonder how many Chinese lives had been lost, how many rockfalls had come crashing down on their heads, turning the rails red as they were laid on the ground. It was the
fanqui
, the foreign devils, who dynamited its path through the valley. They’d come and stomped all over China. They laid down their metal roads, indifferent to the voice of the land itself, their big elephant ears deaf to the anger of the spirits of the mountain.

First the European uniforms marched over the land, swarming like flies across the yellow dust and stealing its wealth, but now it was the Nationalist Army of that strutting peacock, Chiang Kai-shek. He was tearing everything from under the feet of the Chinese people, even the grass in their fields and the green shoots in the paddies. It made Chang An Lo’s heart ache for them and for this vast and beautiful Middle Kingdom.

‘Kuan,’ he said, tasting ice on his lips. ‘Contact Luo, then Wang. Tell them to lay the charges.’

The young woman at his side slid the khaki canvas burden from her shoulder to the ground and began to unbuckle its straps, turning the dials with efficient skill. Kuan had trained as a lawyer in Peking but now was a radio expert, and it was her job to keep the various Communist cadres in constant touch on this mission. She worked well, with no fuss. This pleased Chang and made her an easy companion. He trusted her. Her only weakness was her lack of stamina in the mountains.

As she murmured into the mouthpiece, he closed his eyes and opened his mind. He turned his face northward, directly into the bitter wind that raced down from Siberia, and he breathed it deep into his lungs, let its teeth bite at the soft tissue within him.

Was she there? His fox girl. Somewhere across the border in that foreign land?

Could he taste her in the Russian wind? Smell her? Hear the clear bell of her laughter?

He wouldn’t say her name, not even inside his mind. For fear that the whisper of it would betray her and bring the forces of vengeful spirits down on her copper-fire head. She had stolen something from the gods and they did not forgive.

‘It is time,’ he said with an abruptness that took Kuan by surprise.

‘Now?’ she asked.

‘Now.’

Quickly she buckled up the canvas straps, but by the time her cold fingers had finished the job, Chang was already moving fast down the mountainside.

Death. It seemed to stalk him. Or did he stalk it?

All around him bodies lay torn to shreds, limbs and torsos blasted to limp chunks of flesh and bone that were attracting crows before they were even cold. One head, a young man’s with black blood-streaked hair and one eye missing from its socket, perched on a boulder ten metres from the wreckage and stared straight at Chang. A head, no body. Chang felt the finger of death touch his heart till he shivered, turned away and walked down the broken line of the train. Glass crunched under his feet.

Carriages at both ends had been blown apart by the dual explosions. Ripped open into a raw and tangled twist of metal and timber; bodies spewed out like wolf-bait on the icy ground. As Chang prowled past the carnage he hardened his heart against the screams and reminded himself that these men were his enemies, travelling south with the sole purpose of slaughtering Communists, determined to destroy Mao’s Red Army. But somewhere deep beyond his reach, his heart wept for them.

‘You.’ He pointed at a young soldier in the grey uniform and red armband of the Chinese Communist forces, who was dragging a bleeding figure from the wreckage. The wounded man was a Nationalist Army captain, judging by the colours he wore, and his gut had been torn open by the explosion. He was trying to hold in his bloody innards with his hands, cradling them, but one end of his intestines had slipped from his grasp and trailed behind him. It was unwinding as the young Communist pulled him free, yet the Nationalist captain didn’t scream.

‘You,’ Chang said again. ‘Stop that. You know the orders.’

The young soldier nodded. He looked as if he would vomit.

‘Only those who can walk will travel with us. The rest…’

In a slow, reluctant movement, while Chang stood over him, the young soldier slung the rifle off his back. Despite the ice in the air, sweat formed on his brow. He had the heavy features and broad hands of a farmer’s son, a peasant away from home for the first time in his life. And now this.

Chang recalled his own first killing, seared into his soul.

The soldier nestled the rifle to his shoulder exactly as he’d been taught, but his hands were shaking uncontrollably. The man on the ground didn’t beg, just closed his eyes and listened to the wind and to what he knew would be the last beats of his heart. Abruptly Chang drew his own pistol, leaned down to the captain, placed the muzzle at his temple and pulled the trigger. The body jerked. Chang bowed his head for a split second and commended the man’s spirit to his ancestors.

Death. It seemed to stalk him.

The train’s massive steam engine had bucked off the damaged track and plunged nose first down the bank, but just managed to stay upright. Behind it lurched the baggage wagon at an odd angle, but the only baggage it was carrying came in twenty long wooden boxes, four of which had splintered open in the crash. Chang’s heart raced at the sight of them. He leapt inside the wagon, feet braced against the buckled slope of the floor, and rested a hand possessively on one of the open boxes.

‘Luo,’ he called.

Luo Wen-cai, the young commander of the small assault force, clambered up awkwardly after him. A slow-healing bullet wound in his thigh hampered his usual quick movements, but nothing hampered the grin that shot across his broad face.

‘Chang, my friend, what treasure you have found for us!’

‘Tokarev rifles,’ Chang murmured.

This was even better than he’d expected. This haul would please Chou En-lai at Party Headquarters down south in Shanghai, and put rifles where they were needed – in the military training camps; in the fists of the eager young men who came to fight for the Communist cause. Chou En-lai would preen himself, and sharpen his tiger claws as if he’d hunted them down himself. This success would gain him even greater support from the mao-zi, the Hairy Ones.

The
mao-zi
. The words stuck in Chang’s throat. They were the European Communists, the ones who held the purse strings of the Chinese Communist Party. They were represented by a German called Gerhart Eisler and a Pole known as Rylsky, but both were mere mouthpieces for Moscow. That’s where the funds sprang from and where the real power lay.