Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Their romance has hardly been the stuff of poetry and ballad. It had begun without preamble one night, two lonely people finding comfort in each other’s company. They had passed the night together, drawing more than warmth and release from the nearness, but comfort of a sort, and even something that might have been mistaken for happiness, however briefly. But that had been months ago, and now it was hard to remember a time when they had not been together.

  Hummingbird and Iron Jaw. Iron Jaw and Hummingbird. The Harmonious Fists often spoke the names run together, as though they were speaking of one person and not two. And, so far as the Fists were concerned, the two might as well have been one person, considering how they spoke with one voice whenever addressing the group. Only the inner circle—Jue, Ruan, Mama Noh, and Temujin—knew that not only did the two disagree, and vehemently, but that they did so almost constantly. When not in the public eye, the two were in an almost perpetual state of disagreement, arguing about everything from which potential targets had the most strategic value to how their often meager provisions should be divided up among the Fists. The two understood the value of presenting a united front, and so publicly were always in accord; but behind closed doors their arguments were loud and long running.

  The only time they spoke to each other with anything like tenderness was in the still-dark watches of the night, as they lay side by side in their bed, their bodies sheened with the sweat of their exertions, breathless. In these quiet, tender moments, they spoke to each other in low voices, gently, sharing secrets and confidences, baring their hearts and souls just as they had so recently bared their bodies.

  But as with all things, these tender moments must end, and when the morning came, the two found themselves right back where they’d been, facing each other across a divide neither could seem to bridge.

  Jue reached the command center just as Huang was exiting the makeshift living quarters he shared with Gamine. Ruan was already there, as was Mama Noh. Huang didn’t notice Temujin at first; then he heard the gentle sound of his snoring from the far corner and looked to see the old man curled up around an empty wine jar.

  “Her highness not coming today, is that it?” Ruan sneered, arms crossed over his chest.

  “She’ll be along presently,” Huang answered, and found an empty chair at the table bolted to the deck. The room was long and narrow and had once been used to transport men and materiél to and from military outposts all over Fire Star’s surface. Since falling into the hands of the Fists, when the bandits made good their escape from the compromised stronghold in Mount Shennong, it had been gradually transformed. Woven rugs lined the bare steel floors, bolts of cloth had been hung from the sidewalls, and lights affixed to the ceiling. Furniture had been procured, and the table was bolted in place to keep it from shifting when the crawler was in motion. A similar arrangement, with the addition of a simple pallet with bedding, completed the sleeping chamber in the adjoining section.

  “Too busy communing with the powers, is she?” Jue chuckled.

  “That’s enough of your sneers and titters, you jackanapes.” Mama Noh wagged a heavy finger at the two former bandits, her bangles jangling on her thick arm. Her brief history with them, and with Ruan especially, had been filled with acrimony. “The young mistress is entitled to her personal time and to do with it as she pleases.”

  “And if she pleases to spend her time talking to imaginary friends, that’s her lookout, is that it?” Ruan’s lip curled.

  “The powers will not be mocked,” came the voice of Gamine from the doorway. “Do you profess disbelief, Ruan?”

  As Gamine came and took her place at the table opposite Huang, Ruan and Jue exchanged somewhat uneasy glances. While Huang was the de facto military leader of the Harmonious Fists, Gamine was their spiritual leader. Whether all of the former bandits had fully embraced Gamine’s religious instruction was a moot point so long as they said that they had. But within the confines of the inner circle, the former bandit lieutenants felt more at ease speaking with derision of the confused and cobbled-together cosmology originated by the late Master Wei. When Gamine spoke up in the defense of belief, or castigated them for their lack of faith, it was often difficult to tell whether she was kidding or whether her unreadable expression hid the fires of true belief.

  Of all of them, Huang was the most discomfited to be unable to read Gamine’s true meaning. He’d known her only a relatively short time—not quite a year—but in that time had become as intimate with her as he’d ever been with another, both literally and figuratively, and while it sometimes seemed that their hearts had grown as close as their bodies nightly became, there were still parts of her mind that were closed to him.

  “Now,” said Gamine, folding her hands on the table before her, “I believe there were matters for us to discuss?”

  While the others discussed supplies, training regiments, and possible targets for sabotage and preemptive raids, Gamine glanced from face to face, her own set in a mask of perfect attention, but always letting her eyes, and thoughts, linger on Huang.

  There were times when Huang was so easy for her to read that it seemed he was made of glass. His hungers and appetites were always plain on his face, whether for food or drink or company or other pursuits. She could always tell when he’d rather be somewhere else, and could usually discern easily enough what he’d rather be doing. She could tell when something another said or did raised Huang’s ire and was almost unerring in predicting how he would respond.

  On the other hand, there were aspects of Huang’s character that always left Gamine completely baffled. His choice of friends, for one, confused her to no end. Ruan was uncouth, with poor manners and even worse grooming habits, and whenever he opened his skull-like head to speak, a cloud of noxious breath came pouring out along with his words. Jue wasn’t quite so bad, but he always seemed too easy to respond with one of his lopsided grins, and he was entirely too dismissive of the powers; while he, like Ruan, professed belief publicly in the teachings of Righteous Harmony, too often during the homilies Gamine would look over to see Jue rolling his eyes comically at something she’d said, or hiding a laugh behind his hand while she performed the revelations.

  More and more, Temujin had withdrawn from his role at her side, in particular during the revelations, and Mama Noh and her people had stepped forward to fill the gap. It helped matters considerably to have more people trained in pulling punches and breaking falls, able to come up onstage and help demonstrate the efficacy of the powers’ support. With the audiences swelling so rapidly in recent seasons, there had been mounting suspicion on the part of many of the new converts about the veracity of Gamine’s demonstrations of possession, and when Temujin was too drunk to play his part, and either pulled his punches too soon, leaving huge amounts of daylight showing between his clenched fist and Gamine’s supposedly iron jaw—or worse, when he pulled the punch too late and actually delivered a bruising blow to the side of her face—it did little to help the cause. The former opera players, though, were far more adept at stage fighting, and in recent months the revelations had become increasingly sophisticated and choreographed. Even better, some of the players now could take the stage and demonstrate that they could be possessed by the powers as well, with several apparent true believers resisting the punches and kicks thrown by a number of congregants selected ostensibly at random from the crowd.

  There was little that separated the arts of the theater from the art of the con, Gamine had learned, except that theater-goers knew that they’d be paying when they walked in. And both theater and con were close cousins to religion. All three involved putting on a show for people, giving them what they thought they wanted, and then leaving them satisfied for as long as possible, while taking from them whatever coin the performer thought to be the best payment. In the case of the theater, and most often the con, the payment was in currency. In the case of religion, it could just as easily be currency as well, but at the same time payment could be in less tangible but
no less valuable coin: devotion, loyalty, love.

  Gamine and Temujin had started the Society as a racket, cadging food and lodgings and the occasional coin from gullible townsfolk and farmers all up and down the northern plains. In time, it had grown from a con into a movement, and if truth be told, by that point Gamine had more interested in the devotion of the Society followers than in any currency she might earn for her troubles.

  Now she wasn’t sure. Had she come to believe her own grift? She knew that she wasn’t rendered invulnerable when she faked possession onstage. It would be ridiculous to believe that she did. But at the same time, something had moved her, or moved through her, to assemble a group of people that now numbered in the thousands. And weren’t all of those true believers better off now than they had been as homeless wanderers or poorly paid farm laborers or disgruntled miners? Maybe there were such things as the powers, who simply moved in mysterious ways. Who was she to say that there weren’t?

  So what did Gamine want from those who followed her? What was it she required of those in the audience, those who viewed the theater and bought the con and believed the religion?

  Faith. That was what she wanted. And while she and Huang shared so many hopes and ambitions, and while he gave her so much that she needed, that was the one thing he couldn’t offer. When he looked at her, she knew, Huang didn’t see Iron Jaw, best beloved of the powers. He saw Gamine. And that made all the difference.

  Later, when the day was done, and after they’d exhausted themselves, Gamine lay beside Huang on the bed. She drowsed in the dim light, eyes half-lidded dreamily, and then turned to find him leaning on one elbow, looking at her intently, wearing nothing but a strange expression.

  “What?” Gamine found herself suddenly self-conscious and rubbed her tongue over the front of her smile. “Do I have something stuck in my teeth?”

  Huang laughed gently and shook his head. “No, though you took quite a bite out of Ruan earlier, so you might what to check and see if you’ve got any bits of his backside stuck in there somewhere.”

  Gamine replied with a grin. “He was being an ass—what do you think? He can’t expect these people to pick up strategy as fast as he’s teaching it. These are farmers, after all, not soldiers.”

  “And Ruan was a miner once upon a time. Everyone has to adapt.”

  Gamine nodded with a shrug. “But why are you looking at me like that, then?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re doing.” She punched him playfully in the arm, pushing him back a few inches.

  Huang’s smile broadened, and he looked at her in silence for a moment, and then shook his head as though shaking something loose. “It’s just . . . I can never quite figure you out. It’s almost like you’re two people, one when that door is closed, and quite another when it’s opened.”

  Gamine sighed a little wistfully. “Oh, I think I’ve been more than two people in my time.”

  Huang’s look of confusion intensified. “Say that again?”

  Gamine met his eyes. Her faint smile faded. “What would you say if I told you I spent my earliest years as a street urchin, with no family or home, without even a name of my own?”

  Huang cocked an eyebrow. “I’d . . .” He trailed off, a little helpless. “To be honest, I don’t know what I’d say. Why?” He paused, and studied her closely. “Did you?”

  Gamine nodded. “That’s one person, at least. The nameless waif on the streets, eating out of rubbish bins, sleeping in rough alleyways, with worse manners than a stray dog.”

  “Then you’ve come quite a long way, I’d say.”

  Gamine gave a lopsided grin. “And the long way ’round, at that.” Then, in response to Huang’s continued confusion, she went on. “When I was five years old, servants of the household of Madam Chauviteau-Zong plucked me off the streets, hosed me down and put me in a fresh set of clothes, and presented me to their mistress. She looked me over and said simply ‘Gamine. She’ll do,’ and from that point onward I was part of the household. For the next eight years I lived in the Chauviteau-Zong estate, studying constantly, working endlessly, trained by the best tutors the mistress’s great fortune could afford. Then, at the end of eight years, I was loaded into a carriage with Madam Chauviteau-Zong herself, which carried us to the residence of Governor Ouyang. There I was taken to a secluded room, and along with a number of other children of roughly the same age, subjected to endless examinations. In the end, I answered all the questions correctly and was the last child left standing, the rest having been escorted away by guards. It wasn’t until those same guards escorted me out that I learned what had become of them. It seemed that, having passed all those examinations, I had fulfilled whatever usefulness I served for the mistress, and she was done with me. I was stripped of all my valuables and tossed out into the street.”

  Gamine left off talking, while Huang regarded her with a strange look in his eye.

  “And that was the end of the second person I’ve been, I suppose. The pampered, well-educated ward of the Chauviteau-Zong estate. If I hadn’t met Temujin soon after, who taught me the craft of the con, I doubt I would have survived very long, a cosseted pet set out in the wilds among all the feral beasts. And that, you could say, was the start of the third person who’s lived in my skin. A year or more later, when we chanced upon Wei in the highlands, I first put my foot on the path that would lead to me being Iron Jaw, the fourth and last of my various incarnations.” She paused, for the moment lost in thought. “Still, I can’t explain any of it, in the final analysis. Even all these years later, I have no notion why Chauviteau-Zong should have taken me into her home, and had tutors instruct me, and servants groom me. It was as though I was being cultivated for some purpose, but in the end all that was asked of me was to pass the examinations at the home of the governor-general. Had all the other children been nameless sons and daughters of the street like me?” Gamine shrugged. “It hardly matters, I suppose.”

  Huang reached over and brushed a hand against her bare shoulder, his expression caring. “I’ve heard of your mistress and the games she played. My parents once spoke of Chauviteau-Zong and the others, when I was young. I don’t think they imagined I could overhear, as I doubt they’d have spoken so freely if they had.”

  “What . . . What did they say?” Gamine’s voice cracked a little, despite herself. She felt unaccountably unnerved. Part of her didn’t want to hear any more on the subject, while another part wanted to hear nothing else. “About Chauviteau-Zong?” Gamine felt that she knew precisely what he’d meant by games but was almost afraid to ask.

  “You’ve probably worked most of it out on your own, I’d imagine,” Huang said, somewhat reluctantly. “Your mistress and those of her class, well-connected aristocrats with too much money and not enough to occupy their time, would find various things on which to wager. Who could purchase the fiercest animal? Who could fund the construction of the fastest-flying airship? Who could commission the most brilliant sculpture? And on and on. Eventually, they ran out of things with which to compete and had to find fresh ground. They started . . .” He paused and, with brows knit, regarded Gamine. Then he had to look away before continuing. “They decided to start wagering on people. But it wasn’t enough to find the strongest man, or the fastest runner, or such like. Instead, they had to wager on the essential qualities of a person. As I understand it, the idea came of complaining at the quality of bureaucratic officeholders, and the statement by your mistress or one of her equals that . . . that a monkey could be trained to do just as good a job.” He swallowed hard but still refused to meet Gamine’s gaze. “The agreement was that whoever could take a stray child from the street and train them well enough to pass the highest level of bureaucratic examinations would win the wager.”

  “So the questions we were asked . . . ?”

  Huang nodded. “The equivalent of a juren-level imperial examination.” At last he turned and met her eyes. “At the age of thirteen, you could have walked out of t
hat room in the governor-general’s palace and gone to get a job in the imperial bureaucracy and had employment for life.”

  “And instead I was tossed into the street to fend for myself.”

  Huang reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing. “I don’t imagine it’s any help to hear it, but when my parents discussed the practice, they did so with disapproval. My mother in particular was horrified at the thought of children turned out into the wild like that. My father . . .”

  When he trailed off, averting his eyes, Gamine pressed him to continue.

  “My father,” he finally went on, “said that the children had come from the streets, and been returned to the streets, so while he thought the game was unseemly, he didn’t think it did any real harm to them.”

  To her surprise as much as his, Gamine smiled and nodded. “He was right, I suppose.” She chuckled, and seeing Huang’s confused expression, explained. “I used to harbor a mighty thirst for revenge, and at night would plot all the ways I would make the old woman pay for mistreating me. But now I wonder whether I shouldn’t thank her, instead.”

  “Thank her?” Huang repeated, disbelieving.

  “Certainly. Had Madam Chauviteau-Zong not taken me in when she did, I’d likely have died while still a child. Instead, at her expense the tutors equipped me with all manner of useful skills and knowledge, however much I didn’t recognize it at the time.”

  “But in throwing you out in the street again, wasn’t she just putting you back in harm’s way? After all, you said that if you hadn’t met Temujin, you’d have died then, instead.”