Bayan asked, “They have done so every night the army has camped?”
“Yes, Lord Orlok, and each time increasing in their numbers. But I think tonight’s camp will be the last that mock army will make. I might be wrong. But, as best I could count, today was the first day the foe have not added to their numbers. I think every fighting man in this area of Yun-nan is now congregated in this valley—a force of some fifty thousand, about equal to our own. And, if I were commanding the Yi, I should deem this rather narrow defile the perfect place to make a crushing assault on what appears to be a singularly unapprehensive invader. As I say, I might be wrong. But my warrior instinct tells me the Yi will attack at tomorrow’s dawn.”
“A good report, Captain Toba.” I think Bayan knew by name every man of his half a tuk. “And I am inclined to share your intuition. What of the engineers? Have you any idea of their disposition?”
“Alas, no, Lord Orlok. Communication with them would be impossible without revealing them to the enemy. I have had to assume and trust that they have been keeping pace along the mountain crests, and each day newly placing and readying their secret weapons.”
“Let us trust they did it this day, anyway,” said Bayan. He lifted his head enough to make a slow scan of the mountains ringing the valley.
So did I. If the Orlok was going to persist in holding me responsible for the secret weapons, it was to my best interest that the things do what I hoped they would. If they did, some fifty thousand Bho were going to perish, and about that many Yi as well. It was a considerable responsibility, indeed, for a noncombatant and a Christian. But it would mean winning the war for my chosen side, and a victory would show that God was also on our side, and that would allay any Christian qualms about wholesale slaughter. If the brass balls did not perform as warranted, the Bho would die anyway, but the Yi would not. The war would have to go on, and that might cause me some Christian pangs of conscience—killing so many people, even if they were only Bho, to no purpose at all.
But what mainly concerned me, I must confess, was the satisfaction of my curiosity. I was interested to see if the flaming-powder balls did work, and how well. Certainly, I said to myself, I could see a dozen vantage points on the mountains where, if I had been doing the placing, I would have laid the charges. Those were outcrops of bare rock, like Crusader castles towering up from the forest growth, and showing clefts and checkerings where they had been split by time or weather, and where, if they were suddenly split farther asunder, the slabs ought to topple and fall and, in falling, take other chunks of their mountains with them … .
Bayan grunted a command, and we slithered down the hill the way we had come. At the bottom, he gave orders to the waiting men:
“The real army should be about forty or fifty li behind us, and also preparing to stop for the night. Six of you start riding toward it, this instant. One of you pull off to the trailside every ten li, and wait there, so your horses will be fresh tomorrow. The sixth rider should reach there before sunrise. Tell the sardars not to start marching again. Tell them to wait where they are, lest the dust of their march be visible from here, and spoil all our plans. If all goes as planned tomorrow, I will send Captain Toba riding next and riding hard, and you will rush the word on in relays to the tuk. The word will be for the sardars to bring the whole army on, at a stretch-out gallop, to do the mopping up of any remnants of the enemy that might be left alive in this valley. If things go wrong here, well … I will send Captain Toba with different orders to impart. Now go. Ride.”
The six men left, leading their horses until they should be well out of hearing. Bayan turned to the rest of us.
“Let us eat a little and sleep a little. We must be watching from the hilltop before first light.”
2
AND we were there: the Orlok Bayan and his accompanying officers, the Wang Ukuruji, myself, Captain Toba and the remaining two men of his troop. The others were each carrying a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and Bayan—ready for combat, not parade—was toothless. I, since I had the unwieldy flag-lance to handle, had no other weapon but my belt knife. We lay in the grass and watched as the scene before us slowly became visible. The morning would have to be well advanced before the sun would show itself above the mountaintops, but its rise lightened the cloudless blue sky, and that light gradually reflected down into the black bowl of the valley, and it sucked a mist up off the river. At first, that was the only movement we could see, a milky luminescence drifting against the blackness. But then the valley assumed shape and color: misty blue at its mountain edges, dark green of forests, paler green of the grass and undergrowth in the clearings, silver glitter of the river as the obscuring mist evaporated. With shape and color came movement also: the horse herd began to stir and mill a little, and we could hear an occasional distant whicker and neigh. Then the women of the bok began to arise from their bedrolls and move about, blowing the banked camp fires into flame and setting water to heat for cha—we heard the distant clink of kettles—before waking the menfolk.
The Yi had often enough, by now, watched that camp awaken to know its routine. And they chose this moment for their assault: when there was light enough for them to see their objective clearly, but only the women were astir and the men still asleep. I do not know how the Yi signaled for the attack; I saw no banner waved and heard no trumpet blown. But the Yi warriors moved all in an instant and all together, with admirable precision. One moment, we watchers were looking down an empty hill slope at the bok in the valley; we might have been at the top of an empty amphitheater, looking down the unpeopled seat-shelves at a tableau on the distant stage. The next moment, our view was blocked by the slope’s being no longer empty, as if all the amphitheater’s shelves had magically and silently sprouted a vast audience in tier upon tier. Out of the grass and weeds and bushes downhill of us, there sprang erect a taller growth—leather-armored men, each with a bow already bent and an arrow already nocked to the string. So abruptly did it happen that it seemed to me that some of them had arisen from right before my face; I fancied I could smell the half dozen nearest; and I think I was not the only one of us lurkers who did not have to repress an impulse to start up, too. But I only widened my eyes and moved my head enough to gaze about, seeing all around the valley amphitheater that suddenly visible and menacing audience, standing in thousands, in horseshoe rows and tiers—man-sized where they were near me, doll-sized farther away, insect-sized on the more distant valley slopes—all those ranks quilled and fringed and fuzzed with arrows aimed at a central point that was the stage-tableau encampment.
That had all happened in near silence, and far more quickly than it takes to tell. The next thing that happened—the first sound made by the Yi—was not a concerted, ululating battle cry, as a Mongol army would have made. The sound was only the weird, whishing, slightly whistling noise of all their arrows loosed at once, the thousands of them making all together a sort of fluttering roar, like a wind soughing along the valley. Then the sound, as it diminished away from us, was repeated, but fragmented and doubled into an overlapping noise of whish-whish-whish as the Yi, with great rapidity but no longer simultaneity, plucked from their quivers more arrows—while the first were still in flight—and nocked them and loosed them, meanwhile running full tilt toward the bok. The arrows went high against the sky and briefly darkened the blue of it, even as they dwindled in size from discernible sticks to twigs to slivers to toothpicks to whiskers, and then arced lazily over to become a dim, shady haze that drizzled down on the camp, looking no more dreadful than a gray patter of early morning rain. We watchers, being out behind and near to the archers, had seen and heard that first movement of the assault. But its targets—the standing women and horses and recumbent men in the bok—would probably have noticed nothing until the thousands of arrows began showering down and among and around and into them. No mere haze or fuzz at that extremity of their flight, the arrows were sharp-pointed and heavy and moving fast from their long fall, and many must have fall
en upon flesh and struck to the bone.
And by then the ranks of the Yi nearest to the camp were running into the outskirts of it, still making no warning outcry and heedless of their own fellows’ arrows still falling, their swords and lances already flashing and stabbing and slashing. All the time, up where we were, we watched the Yi warriors still new-sprouting from our hillside and all the mountainsides around, as if the valley greenery was incessantly blooming over and over again into dark flowers that were standing archers, then shedding those and letting them run down toward the bok, then blossoming with more of them. Now there was also noise, louder than the wind-and-rain sound of the arrows—shouts of alarm and outrage and fright and pain from the people in the camp. When that noise began and surprise was no longer enjoined, the Yi also began to bellow battle cries as they ran and converged on their objective, now at last allowing themselves the yells that raise a warrior’s courage and ferocity and, he hopes, strike terror into his foe.
When all was clamor and confusion down in the valley, Bayan said, “I think now is the time, Marco Polo. The Yi are all running for the bok, and no more are springing up, and I see none held in reserve outside the combat area.”
“Now?” I said. “Are you sure, Orlok? I will be highly visible, standing here and waving a flag. It may give the Yi reason for suspicion and pause. If they do not drop me with an immediate arrow.”
“No fear,” he said. “No advancing warrior ever looks back. Get up there.”
So I clambered to my feet, expecting any moment to feel a thumping puncture of my leather cuirass, and hurriedly unfurled the silk from my lance. When nothing struck me down, I gripped the lance in both hands, raised the banner as high as I could, and began waving it from left to right and back again, the yellow shining bright in the morning light and the silk snapping briskly. I could not just wave it once or twice and then again drop prone, on the assumption that it had been seen from afar. I had to stand there until I knew that the distant engineers had seen the signal and acted on it. I was mentally calculating:
How long will it take? They must be already looking this way. Yes, they would have known where we had to come from, at the rear of the enemy. So, from their hiding places, the engineers are peering in this direction. They are scanning this end of the valley, alert for a moving dot of yellow among all the ambient greenery. Now—hui! alalà! evviva!—they see the distant, tiny, wagging banner. Now they scramble back from their lookout positions to wherever they earlier secreted the brass balls. That may take them some moments. Allow a few moments for that. Very well, now they pick up their smoldering incense sticks and blow on them—if they had the good sense to have them already alight and waiting. Perhaps they did not! So now they must fumble with flint and steel and tinder … .
Allow a few more moments for that. God, but the banner was getting heavy. Very well, so now they have their tinder glowing, and now they are wheedling into flame a pile of dry leaves or something. Now they have each got a twig or an incense stick afire, and now they are bearing those over to the brass balls. Now they are touching the fire to the wicks. Now the wicks are burning and sputtering and the engineers are leaping up and running hard for safe distance … .
I wished them good luck and much distance and safe shelter, for I myself was feeling exceptionally exposed and visible and vulnerable. I seemed to have been flaunting my flag and my bravata and my person for an eternity already, and the Yi must be blind not to have spotted me. Now—how long had the Firemaster said?—a slow count of ten after the wicks were lit. I counted ten slow wags of my big, rippling yellow banner … .
Nothing happened.
Caro Gesu, what had gone wrong? Could it be that the engineers had misunderstood? My arms were weary of the waving, and I was sweating profusely, though the sun was still behind the mountains and the morning was not yet warm. Could it be that the engineers had waited to see my signal before even placing the balls? Why had I entrusted this enterprise—and now my very life—to a dozen thickheaded Mongol rankers? Would I have to stand here, waving more and more feebly, for another eternity or two, while the engineers leisurely did what should have been done already? And how long after that would it be before they even began lackadaisically to rummage around in their belt purses for flint and steel? And during all that time, must I stand here flailing this extremely eye-inviting yellow flag? Bayan might be convinced that no warrior ever looked back voluntarily, but any of those Yi had only to stumble and fall, or be knocked sprawling, so that his head turned this way. He could hardly fail to see such an uncommon battlefield sight as I presented. He would yell to his companion warriors, and they would come pelting toward me, loosing arrows as they came … .
The green landscape was blurred by sweat running into my eyes, but I saw a brief flicker of yellow at the corner of my vision. Maledetto! I was letting the banner sag; I must hold it higher. But then, where the flick of yellow had been, there was now a puff of blue against the green. I heard a chorus of “Hui!” from my fellows still prone in the grass, and then they leapt up to stand beside me, cheering “Hui!” again and again. I let the flag and its lance drop, and I stood panting and sweating and watching the yellow flashes and blue smokes of the huo-yao balls doing what they had been intended to do.
The whole center of the valley, where now the Yi and the Bho mock-Mongols were intimately commingled, was clouded by the dust raised by their fierce confusion. But the flashes and smokes were high above that dome of dust, and not obscured by it. They were up where I would have put them myself, twinkling and puffing from those crevices in the castle-like rock outcrops. They did not all ignite at once, but flared by ones and twos, from one mountain height and then another. I was pleased that the engineers had placed them where I would have done, and I was pleased when I counted twelve ignitions; every single ball had performed as warranted—but I was dismayed by the apparent puniness of them. Such tiny flashes of fire, and so soon extinguished—and leaving only such insignificant plumes of blue smoke. The sound of them came much later and, though the noises were loud enough to be heard above the clamor of shouting and scuffling down in the valley, they were no such thunderous roar as I had heard when my palace chamber was demolished. These noises of ignition were only sharp slaps of sound—as might have been produced by a Yi warrior yonder hitting the flat of his sword on a horse’s flank—one and two slapping sounds, and then several together in a sustained crackle of slaps, and then the final few separate again.
And then nothing more happened, except that the furious but futile battle continued unabated down in the valley, where none of the combatants seemed to have noticed our byplay in the heights. The Orlok turned and gave me a lacerating look. I shrugged my eyebrows helplessly at him. But suddenly all the other men were murmuring “Hui!” in a wondering way, and they were all pointing, and most of them in different directions. Bayan and I looked first where one was pointing, and then where another was, and another. Over here, high up, the cleft gashed in a wall-like rock was perceptibly widening. Over there, high up, two great slabs of rock that had been side by side were gradually leaning apart. Over yonder, high up, a pinnacle of rock like a castle keep was toppling over, and breaking into separate rocks as it did so, and spraying those rocks apart, and doing all those things as slowly as if it had been under water.
If those mountains truly never had suffered an avalanche before, then because they never had, they may have been ready and poised for one. I think we could have accomplished our intentions with just three or four of the brass balls lodged on either side of the valley; we had put six on each side, and all had done their work. And, puny as was the commencement of the performance, the conclusion was spectacular. I can best describe it thus: consider the high rocks to have been a few exposed knobs of the backbones of the mountains, and consider our charges to have been hammer blows that broke the bones. As the mountains’ spines crumbled, their earth cover began to peel away here and there, like a hide being skinned piecemeal off an animal. And as the
hide wrinkled and folded, the forests began to shed and shred off it, as a camel’s fur does in summertime, in unsightly tufts and patches.
As early as the breaking-away of the first rocks, we watchers could feel the hill under us tremble, though we were many li distant from the very nearest of those rockslides. The valley floor had to be quivering then, too, but the two armies conjoined in battle still took no notice; or, if they did, every man and woman no doubt believed it to be only his or her own personal quaking of fear and rage. I remember thinking: that must be the way we mortals will ignore the first tremors of Armageddon, continuing to pursue our trivial and pitiful and spiteful little strifes even while God is loosing the unimaginable devastation that will end the world and all.
But a goodly piece of the world was being devastated right here. The falling rocks dislodged other rocks below them and, rolling and sliding, they gouged up great swathes and whole zonte of earth and then, rocks and earth together, they scoured their various mountainsides of their vegetation, the trees toppling and colliding and heaping up and overlying and splintering, and then the surface of each mountain and everything that grew upon it or was contained within it—boulders, rocks, stones, clods, loose earth, meadow-sized pieces of rumpled turf, trees, bushes, flowers, probably even the forest creatures caught unawares—all came down, down into the valley, in a dozen or more separate avalanches, and the noise of them, until now delayed by distance, finally began to batter our ears. It was a mutter that grew to a growl that grew to a roar that grew to a thunder, but a thunder like I never heard before—not even in the unstable heights of the Pai-Mir, where the noises had often been loud, but never for longer than a few minutes. This thunder here continued to grow in volume and to create echoes and to collect and absorb the echoes, and to bellow ever louder, as if it never would reach its loudest. Now the hill on which we stood was quivering like a jelly—the noise alone might have been enough to shake it—so that we could scarcely keep our feet, and all the trees nearby us were rustling so they shed many of their leaves, and birds were bursting up everywhere, squawking and screeching, and the very air around us seemed to quake.
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