Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Gamine supposed that she fell a little bit in love with Mama Noh when first she saw her, even considering how scared she was of this outlandish interloper, but when Mama Noh opened her mouth, all doubts and reservations were forgotten, and Gamine was sure that she’d found a friend.

  When they’d completed the most recent funereal rites and piled sand as high as possible over the body of the departed, the Society followers returned to their ragged circle of tents to begin preparing the evening meal. The sun rode low in the west while both moons hung overhead.

  The Society ate their meals together these days, stretching their meager rations as far as they were able. Watery soups and thin stews were the order of the day, with the bowls filled with little more than slightly discolored water. At least they were served steaming hot, if nothing else, since fire kits to heat the pots were hardly in short supply.

  The tents of the camp were arranged, as always, in roughly concentric rings, surrounding a broad clearing at the middle. At one side of this clearing was parked the red crawler that gave the opera company its name, and it was in the lee of the crawler that Gamine and Mama Noh sat now, with the other Red Crawler players mixed here and there with the Society followers.

  “Your attentions seemed to drift in the observances, child,” Mama Noh said, then took a delicate, lingering sip of her soup. She held the bowl to her lips and inhaled deeply. Though the provender was humble, still Mama Noh was one who seemed to savor every bite of life, no matter how small or unsatisfying. As she was fond of saying, Mama Noh was convinced that life was a banquet, and that most people, failing to realize it, were starving. “Perhaps, if the need should arise again, one of my people, or even I myself, might take this burden from your shoulders and perform the rites instead?”

  Gamine set down her bowl, hardly touched, and shot a dark look at the players’ matriarch. “If the need should arise?” She shook her head angrily. “If?! Lady, it is instead a question of when, or even how soon! If you ask me, we’ll be lucky if we make it through tomorrow without having to bury another of our people. If we make it through two days running, I think I might just have to dance in celebration!”

  Mama Noh held her bowl under her nostrils for a moment longer, her eyes half-lidded, as though the scent of the watery soup were the most pleasant thing she’d ever smelled. Then she gently set the bowl on the ground before her folded legs, her bangles jingling.

  “Merely a suggestion, my dear child, merely a suggestion.”

  Gamine glowered, but after a moment her expression softened fractionally. “I’m sorry, Mama Noh. It’s not . . .” She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm. “I just can’t help but wonder what we’re doing out here.”

  “Journeying to the west, it was my understanding,” Mama Noh said with a faint smile.

  Gamine sighed. “But to where? We’ve heard that there are communities out past the Three Sovereigns that might be more welcoming, but are there really?”

  Mama Noh’s eyes narrowed, and when she spoke again, there was iron beneath her words. “They could hardly be less welcoming than those we left behind in the east, my child.”

  Gamine’s eyes met Mama Noh’s, and she nodded. The Red Crawler Opera Company, Gamine knew, had learned that the authorities in the villages and towns to the north and east seemed to have as little use for tumblers and players as they did for itinerant preachers and their camp followers. The Red Crawler had found itself driven out of towns, not just with rifle barrels, but with rifle shot, and had lost at least one of their number to injuries sustained when a riot broke out at one of their performances. Until they had encountered the Society of Righteous Harmony out on the highlands, the Red Crawler Opera Company had intended to return to Tianfei Valley in the south, however much the prospect failed to excite them—they had left the valley under a cloud some time before, when a few of their number ran afoul of the local authorities, after it was discovered that they were augmenting their earnings as company players with activities of a less savory and not entirely legal character. It might be some time before they could safely return to Fanchuan. Once they had met Gamine and her people, though, the Red Crawler had seen a new road open up before them, and they had requested to join their caravan.

  The Society followers had taken to the Red Crawler people right away, and vice versa. The players were all gymnasts and martial artists, as all opera performers were required by necessity to be, and many of those in the camp now spent what little idle time they had studying the players’ movements closely, gradually learning how to move as the players did. No one had ever said out loud that their intention was to learn to fight, but there were many in both the Society and in the opera company who’d had their fill of quaking when confronted by the authorities, and who rehearsed endlessly in their heads how they would handle such encounters differently in the future, knowing now what they did of life in the wilderness. Many in both groups, which was now quickly becoming one melded group, felt that the town fathers and farm owners who had driven them out had done so without a single thought as to what might befall the wanderers when they crossed from the arable lands to the east into the barren wastes of the west.

  One of those who harbored dark thoughts about those who had harried them away from civilization was Gamine herself, however much she kept those thoughts to herself when addressing the others. In close company, though, when talking with Temujin or Mama Noh, Gamine felt more comfortable speaking her mind, and the topic of how things could have been done differently was a source of frequent discussion.

  So it was that, when the evening meal was interrupted by word that military crawlers had been spotted approaching the camp from the west, Gamine’s pulse quickened, and her hands tightened into white-knuckled fists at her sides.

  “Mama Noh,” Gamine said, rising to her feet, her expression dark, “I can’t speak for you, but as for me, I am sick and tired of running.”

  The Red Crawler’s matriarch set her bowl down gently and daintily wiped her fingers dry on a silk kerchief. Then she unfolded, surprisingly graceful given her prodigious bulk, and stood up beside Gamine.

  “My child,” she said, her tobacco-stained lips curling in a broad smile, “I believe you’re reading my verses from the script again.”

  “Shall we go see what these approaching crawlers are about?”

  Mama Noh threaded her arm through Gamine’s. “You’re in charge around here, dear. I just provide entertainment. Lead on.”

  Gamine stood with Temujin on one side and Mama Noh on the other as the crawlers approached through the evening twilight in a cloud of dust.

  “You sure this is a good idea, girl?” Temujin took a sip from his wine jar, which these days was so diluted with water that it was a close cousin to the thin soups at mealtime. “I mean, mightn’t we better head the other way, ’stead of standing here waiting for the hurly-burly to break loose?”

  “Don’t listen to him, dear child,” Mama Noh said, patting Gamine’s shoulder. “He’s just speaking his fear.”

  “You’re damned right I’m speaking fear, you great puff guts. I’m well and truly terrified, I am. I’m not sure what kind of past you’ve got with military types, but I’ve had a run-in or two with them in my day, and I’ll tell you for nothing the main problem with them: they’re all armed. You get a regular-day cove hot and bothered at you, and the worst he’ll do is scream himself red or call for a guardsman. But upsetting a soldier’s almost as bad as crossing a Parley, since they’re both just as likely to pull a gun or a knife and end the matter with quick-ness.”

  “If a gun or knife might cease your endless complaining, you dour old warthog, it might well be worth the risk.”

  “That’s enough, both of you,” Gamine said sharply. She looked from one to the other, eyes flashing. “We’re not alone here, you know.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder and saw the mass of Society followers and Red Crawler people gathered behind them, watching with expectant expressions. Seeing them no
w like this, in the dying light of the sun, all sharing the same mixture of fear and apprehension, Gamine realized that they really had become one group, these last weeks. Whether they were laborers who had joined the Society after leaving behind unrewarding jobs on Combine plantations, or farmers who had joined because they’d lost their homes and had nowhere else to go, or opera players who had joined because their paths converged in the wilderness and the Society presented alternatives they might not otherwise have had, they were all now a part of the Society of Righteous Harmony, whether they fully accepted all the tenets or not. And all of them looked to Gamine for leadership.

  The crawlers were only a short distance away now, and the yellowish green coloration was now unmistakable, even in the fading light. There was no question about it, these were military crawlers. They could not again hope to encounter another crawler painted bright red and full of new friends.

  Everyone was looking to Gamine to lead them. In which case, it was time she started to lead.

  Afterward, Gamine could not recall all of the speech she’d given there in the twilight, but she remembered enough to retain the essential gist.

  The crawlers had ground to a halt only a few paces away, the engines still idling noisily, sounding like dying monsters. Gamine had stepped forward and, in a loud voice, addressed those within.

  Gamine spoke about how the Society had been forced out into this wilderness, far away from the civilized lands, but that the powers still had a purpose for them all. Still, they could not simply sit back and wait for their destiny to find them, but would have to get up on their feet, stand their ground, and fight to make their destiny a reality. And that stand, that fight, would start here and now. They were tired of running and would run no more.

  Gamine doubted that any but Mama Noh and the other players recognized that so many of the turns of phrase she used were borrowed liberally from Song Huagu’s The Miner’s Journey, but if the players hid knowing smiles, the rest of the Society followers were entirely galvanized. And if any of the followers had recognized the phrases, they’d only have been even more convinced that the powers now spoke through the girl they called Iron Jaw. The Society was ready to follow Gamine anywhere she went, to take any risk she asked of them, for the sake of the powers and the special destiny that awaited them.

  When Gamine had ended her speech, as if in response, the hatch of the lead crawler opened, and three men climbed out. They seemed weary, as though it was a struggle just to remain on their feet.

  They approached Gamine, their hands empty. They were imposing figures but didn’t wear uniforms, as Gamine might have expected, but ragged clothes more suited to common laborers. If not for the swords and pistols hanging at their belts, they might easily have been the sort of people who had stood and listened to Gamine’s homilies outside any one of a dozen villages and towns in the east, or who had been convinced by her revelations that she was protected by divine hands.

  One of the three had a round face, with a large scar crawling up from the side of his mouth, while another was so gaunt that he looked almost like an animated skeleton. The third, who walked in the lead, was a young man only a few years Gamine’s senior, who seemed to be missing fingers on both hands, and while his clothes were as shabby as those of his fellows, the ivory-handled sword that hung at his side looked to be worth a fortune.

  The three stopped in front of Gamine and her two advisors, just out of arm’s reach. Then the young man smiled.

  “So you’re tired of running, are you? Well, I think my friends and I are tired of running, too.”

  ACT IV

  UNISON

  METAL MONKEY YEAR, FIFTY-SEVENTH YEAR OF THE TIANBIAN EMPEROR

  HUANG WASN’T SURE WHEN THE NAME HAD FIRST BEEN spoken. It was an idle curiosity for him at best, and not something he spent any amount of time troubling over. But still he wondered, when there was little else to occupy his thoughts, at what moment they had first become the Harmonious Fists.

  Their numbers had swelled since the ragtag remains of the bandit band and the battered camp of the Society of Righteous Harmony first encountered each other, out there on the highlands. Then, there had been perhaps a few hundred Society followers and a half dozen bandits, all told. Now the group numbered in the thousands and, what was more, nearly all distinctions between farm laborers and former bandits had been lost. Even the more flamboyant players of the Red Crawler Opera Company had blended into the mix, though they had retained enough of their colorful character that they were still relatively easy to spot in the crowd.

  Huang could see them now, in fact. A few of Mama Noh’s people were instructing a large group of Fists in the use of martial arts, practicing ritualized movements similar to those Gamine used in her daily services, but here with a more practical application than in summoning up the support of imaginary powers. And on the other side of the camp, separated by carefully regimented rows of tents laid out in a precise grid, Huang could see Jue with another group of Fists, training them in the use of the rifles that a raiding party had brought back from an attack on a military-supply convoy. From where he sat, atop the crawler that served him as both mobile command center and personal residence, Huang could faintly hear the pok pok sound of the rifles being fired, and now and then could see one of the Fists fly backward through the air, having failed to properly brace himself for the rifle’s recoil.

  Huang laid a hand on the ivory hilt of the red-bladed saber at his side and shook his head. He’d fired his share of rifles and pistols these last seasons, striking back against the forces of Governor Ouyang. But he still preferred close quarters with a blade in hand, for all of that. With a sword, he felt more in control, while with a firearm he felt he was simply servicing the weapon, which was itself doing all the work. It hardly mattered, though. They were all simply tools for doing a job. Sword, rifle, pistol.

  And fist, of course. So when had they become the Harmonious Fists? Huang had to assume that there was some conflation between the Righteous Harmony of Gamine’s religious ecstatics and the more physical immediacy of the former bandits’ preferred mode of conflict resolution. Perhaps the newer recruits, those disaffected miners and former plantations laborers and dispossessed families who joined them in their dozens, had confused the two when hearing the garbled history of the uprising from those who were on hand to greet them. And so the often drunken, often brawling bandits who had come with the man called Hummingbird and the somewhat more serene men and women who followed the girl called Iron Jaw in seeking after righteous harmony had been commingled in the eyes of these newcomers as brawlers who sought righteousness, fists that fought for harmony.

  Whatever its origins, in time the name had passed through the ranks, and then had been picked up by the villages and towns who were sympathetic to their aims, and then adopted by those who defended the very policies that Huang sought to defeat. And so, given enough time, the resistance that Huang and Gamine had begun, that day their two groups met on the highlands, had come to be known as the Harmonious Fists Uprising.

  Huang’s reverie was interrupted by a series of loud thumps on the roof of the crawler. He was being summoned. Taking a last look across the ordered ranks of tents—the people tending to the cooking fires, the men and women practicing their martial-arts forms or firing and reloading their rifles—he hauled open the hatch in the crawler roof and swung down inside.

  “What do you do up there, anyway?”

  “Look for somewhere else to sleep,” Huang said with a sly grin. “The bed’s much too crowded as it is.”

  In response, Huang caught a beaded cushion in the face. Rubbing his stinging cheek, he hissed in pain. “Ow. That actually hurt.”

  “Serves you right.” Gamine looked up at him from the bed, wearing the unreadable and inscrutable expression he always found so frustrating. “If you put your faith in the powers, you wouldn’t get hurt as often, now would you?”

  One corner of Huang’s mouth tugged upward in a smile, while the other corner
remained unconvinced. Was Gamine kidding? She didn’t actually believe that, did she? It was so often hard to tell with her.

  “Come on, you,” Huang said, kicking the side of the bed with his foot, sending Gamine jostling back and forth. “The others will all be here by now.”

  Gamine scowled at him and stuck out her tongue. In moments like that, she always seemed so much younger. When she addressed the Fists in the daily religious services, she was Iron Jaw, with an apparent wisdom beyond her years. And though Huang knew that she was only as old now as he’d been when he’d left Fanchuan and joined the convoy to Far Sight Outpost, years before, he often felt that she’d managed to cram more living into her relatively short life, and never felt like he was any older than she. But looking up at him now, with her hair tousled and her tongue out in a childishly peeved expression, just for a moment she looked like a little girl. A girl who commanded the respect and loyalty of thousands who considered her the anointed spokesperson of the supernatural powers, but a little girl nonetheless.

  “Come on,” he repeated, “we’re late for the council meeting as it is.”

  Then the moment passed, and the little girl was gone. Gamine’s tongue flicked back into her mouth, and her unreadable expression grew quite a bit more readable.

  “You and your damned council,” she snarled. “Well, go on, then, if you must.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “When it suits me.”

  Then she turned away from him, tugging a quilted blanket over her shoulders, and waited for him to leave.

  Huang sighed. He watched her back for a long moment, then opened the hatch that led from their improvised sleeping chambers into the remainder of the crawler’s cargo hold, which had been set up as the mobile command center. He knew full well that there was no point in arguing with Gamine when the conversation took one of these turns.