The Mercenaries (12 page)

Ira fought for solemn words to hide his mirth. The situation was so farcical it was hard to know what to say without being insulting.

‘The General is expecting it,’ Lao pointed out firmly. ‘And Captain Yang assures us his aeroplanes are ready for immediate use.’

Fagan gave his half-witted yelp of laughter. ‘He does, does he?’ he said.

He jerked a hand at the Bleriot, whose cylinders were red with rust and whose wooden propeller was splintered and bound with copper wire as though it had hit the ground in some far-distant forced landing and been crudely repaired. His eyes were wild and his face flushed with drink. His soul seemed to be stirred to cataclysmic proportions.

‘As a specialist in the more subtle varieties of sin, me ould ardent boyo,’ he shouted, his accent thick enough to cut with a knife, ‘I see no reason to save Captain Yang’s rat-faced bloody visage for posterity. You can tell Himself--the Pride of the Missionaries, the Warlord of the South-West, the Great High Pajandrum--that even if they could get off the ground --which they never will--Holy God, I’d no more think of flyin’ one of them things than I would of tryin’ to teach them bloody oxen out there on the field to dance the foxtrot.’

2

It seemed for days that the Warload of the South-West was sulking. There was no sign either of him or of Lao and for a whole fortnight the group at Kailin were left entirely to their own devices.

The parade at the airfield had broken up in confusion after Fagan’s comments and there had been a loud argument between Fagan and Lao which had then become one between Lao and General Tsu, with various aides of different rank joining in from time to time and Captain Yang yelling defensively between the various groups and Ira’s party.

It had started to rain heavily in the middle of it all, the torches hissing and spitting in the downpour, and GeneralTsu had retreated to the Pierce-Arrow, his face like thunder. No one had thought to dismiss his troops, however, and they had continued throughout all the shouting and the high wang-yang of Chinese voices to stand in lines, hunched against the rain but interested in the indignity of their superiors quarrelling.

Eventually Tsu had driven away in high dudgeon with Lao, leaving the argument to be finished by Kee and Captain Yang, who, by this time, had been alternatively yelling about his honour and spitting with rage and likely, it seemed, to swing his sword out of its long curved scabbard at any moment to take a swipe at Fagan’s head.

With a good Irishman’s contempt for danger, Fagan had stood his ground. ‘I expect it was a bloody flight mechanic you were in this goddam air circus of yours,’ he snorted. ‘Sure, and not a very good one at that. A grease monkey, maybe, employed to wipe the engines down and clean the vomit out of the cockpits.’

They had got him away at last in a borrowed car, with an affronted and furious Ellie alongside the driver and Ira and Sammy sitting on the indignant Fagan in the back. They heard the argument in the bungalow across the garden going on long after they had closed the door behind them.

Still laughing, they had crossed the lawn to find Mei-Mei waiting for them with her birdcage and her smiles. They had forgotten all about her in the excitement and were startled to see her still around. She seemed to be dressed in her best, in dark grey silk-fringed trousers and a red silk jacket, and she was wearing make-up with carmine lips and a single flower behind her ear. As they appeared, she bent her head in a kow-tow before them.

They stared uneasily at each other, wondering what to do about her,

‘Seems to be a sort of housekeeper,’ Sammy said.

Ira eyed the girl dubiously. She was physically fragile, with sloping shoulders and narrow hips, and her hair, polished like fine lacquer, was wound carefully round the top of her head.

‘A nice decorative one, anyway,’ he commented.

She spoke softly for a while, smiles like ripples moving over her lips, but neither of them could understand her.

‘Think she’s got something warming in the oven?’ Sammy asked.

She looked startled and disappointed as they went to their rooms, but made no attempt to follow them. Instead, she sat down with her birdcage by the goldfish pond in the garden as though she were going to wait out the night there.

‘Hope she’s good on bacon and eggs,’ Sammy said as he closed the door.

She was still there next morning when the houseboy wakened them by the simple expedient of sticking a cigarette between their lips and lighting it. She had hung coils of red prayer paper near the door and was waiting by it, quiet and grave-faced, wearing a soft jacket ducktailed at the hips, her hair braided and held by a silver clasp. She was obviously not dressed for work and was on her knees in front of three smouldering joss-sticks which sent up spirals of aromatic smoke.

Sammy poked his head out uneasily. She seemed to be putting out prayers for their immortal souls but she didn’t have the look of a priest or joss-man and they couldn’t imagine that she’d been sent just to make the place smell sweet.

‘She’s still there,’ he said uneasily.

‘What doing?’

‘Burning joss. For us, I reckon.’

It was a warm morning, the scent of blossom in the air, and Ira was on the verandah, staring at the morning scurry of small birds and the lifting flap of herons from the river. Sammy joined him after a while and in the distance they could see the decorated roofs of a pagoda through the trees and hear the high-pitched chatter of Chinese voices in the street as peasant women went past hauling heavy handcarts loaded with sacks of rice or seed or canisters of human manure to fertilise the paddies outside the town, straining forward against the shafts and trailing smells of ordure and dust.

‘Lor’, don’t it bugle?’ Sammy commented, wrinkling his nose. ‘I’d rather have Mei-Mei’s joss, I reckon.’

They peeped back in the house, but Mei-Mei was still doing obeisances on the floor and, feeling vaguely as though they were intruding on some private ceremony, they retreated once more to the verandah, eager for food but uncertain whether to join in her devotions or ignore her.

Just inside a room on the next verandah they could see Ellie washing herself, half-naked as usual, a macaw-coloured pareu she’d bought the day before knotted round her waist.

‘Why’s she always do it where we can see her?’ Sammy asked wonderingly.

Fagan’s voice came across to them. He was singing in a dubious baritone, which he kept interrupting to shout to Ellie. They seemed to have recovered their good temper, a strange bewildered lost couple who never seemed to know whether they were happy in each other’s company or not.

After a while Fagan joined Ellie on the verandah and they saw him sponging her back, an operation which finally dissolved into a wrestling match that ended abruptly as he snatched away the pareu. For a while, they struggled, Ellie red-faced and shrieking and Fagan shouting with laughter, then he grabbed her in his arms and carried her screaming out of sight. For a while the shrieks continued across Fagan’s half-witted laughter, then they died away to a heavy silence.

Sammy turned to Ira. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than fighting,’ he observed.

Mei-Mei was still waiting for them as they left their room, and they stopped in front of her, uncertain and baffled. Their ablutions had been conducted entirely by the houseboy who had been ready with tin bath, soap, water, sponge and toothbrushes without ever really being visible, and Ira wondered uneasily if Mei-Mei’s duties involved something similar.

Since she couldn’t speak English, she was unable to enlighten them, and Sammy opened the play by slapping her behind as he passed her.

‘ ‘Mornin’,’ he said gaily.

‘Mo-Nin?’ She gestured with fluttering hands at him. Sammy shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m Sammy. Me--Sammy. Him--Ira. You--Mei-Mei. Yes?’

‘Yes.’ She beamed and followed them through to the dining area. She didn’t appear to have anything to do with the breakfast of chicken and noodles, however, or even the ceremony with incense sticks, prayer paper and fireworks that preceded it, and merely sat watching as the houseboy brought in the food, waiting with her birdcage and a cup of green tea for them to finish.

‘What do you reckon she’s for?’ Ira asked as they went outside to wait for the ancient Peugeot Lao had promised to send for them.

‘Gawd knows. Just decoration perhaps, like a geisha.’ Sammy turned and waved to the girl waiting on the steps of the bungalow. ‘So long, Mei-Mei.’

‘So-Long?’

‘So long. Goodbye.’

Her grave face broke into a smile and she waved. ‘Gu-Bai. Me Mei-Mei. You Sah-Mee. Him Ai-Lah.’

Sammy nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’re catching on. Me Sammy. Him Ira.’ He turned to Ira as she disappeared inside the bungalow. ‘Conversation’s a bit limited, isn’t it?’ he said.

Fagan’s outburst the night before seemed to have done him good and he turned up at the field later in the day beaming with good nature but still unpredictable, stormy and likely to explode into a doom-laden mood at any moment.

‘Whatever it was he got,’ Sammy chuckled, ‘he obviously enjoyed it.’

Ellie was warmer and more friendly, too, her face attractive under the short blonde curls. Fagan seemed to have got round her very effectively during the night and the frozenfaced anger at his behaviour the evening before had gone.

Since there was no one on the field to stop them, not even a night watchman, they moved among Tsu’s old aeroplanes, climbing into cockpits and testing flabby controls, feeling compression and running their hands over rotten fabric and struts devoid of varnish. Only the Aviatik, Yang’s machine, seemed to be airworthy.

‘And even that’s sagging like a busted balloon,’ Sammy observed.

Eventually they dug out a few of the tools they’d brought with them for running repairs and took off the engine cowlings. Perished rubber, verdigris and rust met their eyes.

‘All right for scrap,’ Ellie commented shortly.

‘Farman might make it,’ Sammy pointed out shrewdly. “We might make the Crossley go, too, and the Albion’s got a dynamo we can use.’

Reaching across the cockpit of the wingless D7, Ira cocked the guns and pressed the trigger, listening to the thump as the breech blocks shot home.

‘Guns work,’ he commented with a grin. ‘So would the interrupter, I think. If this wingless wonder only had wings it could do a lot of damage. Still, it’s got a propeller and we can use it for spares.’

Later in the day, Kee appeared and borrowed a few more tools for them, but there was little they could do until Geary and Lawn and their crates of spares turned up.

‘Why should we worry?’ Sammy said. ‘It’s not our war.’ For three days no one came near them except Lieutenant Kee, but he was only concerned with their comfort.

‘Everything is satisfactory?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What ho! The bungalow is O.K.?’

‘The bungalow’s fine.’

‘Jolly decent! I say, how is the girl?’

‘Girl?’ Ira stared at him.

‘Good gracious my, the one the General sent to you.’

‘Oh, she’s fine.’ Ira nodded enthusiastically.

Kee seemed pleased and went away and, for lack of anything else to do, they began to work on the ancient Crossley. When they came to a full stop for lack of tools, they hired sedan chairs and explored the old city, a mass of Ming-type buildings with green roofs, up-curved so that demons sliding down them might do themselves a mischief as they dropped off the eaves. There was a half-hidden lake with stiff lotuses spread on a glistening grey surface that was fringed with willows and wisteria, and behind the town, rising out of the ash-coloured hills, a miniature square-topped mountain like a cottage loaf, red-brown at the base and fading to a pink-blue at its summit.

On closer acquaintance, the majestic city walls along the river turned out to be festooned with washing, and more was flapping along the steps and under the arches where the great iron-studded gates stood open. Everything in Hwai-Yang seemed to be done by hand, and there was no water except for what the coolies carried, and no light at night apart from bobbing paper lanterns

Dragon bridges and pagodas rubbed shoulders with fountains and marble tombs guarded by snarling monsters; and there were joss houses full of strange deities and redolent with perfumed smoke where women burned incense for easy childbirth; and outdoor theatres where crowds of people watched, happily eating highly coloured sweets and spitting sunflower seeds or having their ears cleaned by professional aurists moving among the seats. Camel trains and shaggy sorebacked mules shoved through the pedestrians picking their way round the heaps of dirt where babies and scavenging pigs wallowed together. A group of Tsu soldiers, sly, sullen and hangdog, moved past, slouching and slovenly and hung about with teapots, saucepans and umbrellas. They were pushing ahead of them a bunch of lunatics, lepers and criminals who were tied together by their pigtails, wailing and shrieking and gibbering. The crowd watched impassively--idlers carrying singing birds on the end of a stick or hovering over a cricket fight; letter-writers with horn spectacles on the ends of their noses and their crinkly red paper under their arms on the look-out for lovesick youths or enamelled-faced courtesans who might need their skill; nomad horsemen from the north sucking toffee apples as they stared at the shops; old ivoried men with fans and black-garbed peasants carrying aged relatives on their shoulders; and tiny doll-like children, their hair plaited into stiff tufts about their heads, chirruping like flocks of gaily coloured birds. It was all so incredible it took their breath away

Because of the steep streets and that vast swathe of enormous stone steps that cut the town in half like a huge wound, there were no wheeled vehicles in the centre of the city--only sedan chairs carried by yelling baggy-trousered coolies, callouses on their shoulders as big as oranges, who ran up and down like ants to the river, the alleyways full of their noise. There seemed to be bells tinkling everywhere, and the whole city seemed to be filled with resonance and the clip-trotting of ponies.

There were only a few foreign export and import agencies along the bund, but a solid mat of junks affronted with masts heaved and rolled among the garbage between the sandbanks. Along the river, to right and left of the Tien An-Men steps, there were low warehouses and godowns roofed with chocolate-coloured tiles. Near them, on the stone steps of the wharf, girls waited for the sailors off the foreign gunboats that stopped occasionally to water, full-lipped, jet-eyed and bored, leaning against the bars with their daubed signs. ENGLIƧ BEER. GIN ƧLINGƧ. LADIEƧ FOR ƧAILORƧ.