Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Gamine offered a smile. “Well, then I suppose I need to thank him, too.”

  The night wore on, but neither Huang or Gamine seemed much in a mood for sleeping. Gamine’s mention of revenge had sparked thoughts of vengeance in Huang’s mind, and he smoldered with it, even some time later.

  “What’s bothering you, Fei?” Gamine said, laying a hand on his chest, with her head pillowed on his arm. No one but Gamine called him by that name, these days. To everyone else, he was only and always Hummingbird.

  “It’s just . . .” he started, then broke off. “I don’t know, Gamine.” He knew that he was the only one to call her by that name, which seemed only fitting. Even Temujin had taken to calling her Iron Jaw like everyone else, but not without an undercurrent of derision. “I just keep thinking about what you said about your mistress, and plotting revenge against her.”

  “Mmm?” Gamine smiled. “Why, do you have any suggestions?”

  Huang chuckled and shook his head. “No, it’s just . . .” He took a heavy breath. “I’ve vowed vengeance myself, and I don’t think I could shake it off as easily as you seem to be doing.”

  Gamine leaned in closer. “You’re not planning on thanking this person, I take it?”

  Huang’s eyes flashed darkly, and his mouth drew into a tight line. “No,” he said, managing to keep his tone level, but barely.

  After a pause, Gamine said, “So who is this person, then, to have angered you so?”

  Huang shook his head in frustration. “I don’t know his name. Or even what he looks like, come to that. Only that he has a scar over his right eye in the shape of a small sideways cross, and fair-colored hair. He was the Bannerman who killed my friend, the bandit chief Zhao. I . . .”

  Huang left off, his eyes stinging.

  “What is it?”

  “It . . . it was my fault,” he finally admitted. “I was facing another Bannerman and had the opportunity to defeat him and go to Zhao’s aid, but I was squeamish at the thought of killing and let the opportunity pass by, waiting for the chance of a nonfatal wound. If I’d taken the earlier opportunity, I wouldn’t have been too late to save Zhao, and he’d still be alive today.”

  Gamine pushed back from him and rose up on her elbows to look him in the eye.

  “In which case you might not have fled your mountain, but remained there and continued in the life of the bandit?”

  Huang, wiping his eyes, could only shrug. “Perhaps,” he allowed.

  “And if you had continued in that life, who is to say that the next time you encountered the military he wouldn’t have fallen, or you, or both? And then you’d never have met me and the rest of the Society on the road, and this revolution of ours would never have begun, and none of these people who have flocked to our side would have anyone to fight for their interests. Is that preferable?”

  Huang gave her a hard look, silent but unconvinced.

  “It’s a hard thing to lose someone close to you, I know,” Gamine went on. “For all that he was a crazy old man, I find that I still miss Master Wei from time to time, and not just because when he was still alive I could take a break from the homilies from time to time. But that doesn’t mean that you can just wallow in self-pity over the loss. Nor lose yourself to thoughts of revenge. It’s like Master Wei always said, ‘However difficult the road, there is a plan, and the powers always have a purpose for us.’”

  Huang’s eyes narrowed, and he bared his teeth in a sneer. “Save your ‘powers’ nonsense for the audience, Iron Jaw. I don’t need it, any more than I need your talk of ‘purpose’ and ‘plans.’ ”

  Tugging his arm from under her shoulder, Huang rolled over, and lay on his side facing away from her.

  A moment passed, and then he felt Gamine’s hand on his shoulder. A slight gesture, a brief attempt at contact. “I don’t know if it means anything to you, but I think I met your Bannerman once myself. Just around the time that Wei died. He was the one to drive us off from Yinglong. Light hair and a cross-shaped scar over his eye. Said his name was . . . Kingston, perhaps? Something Briton-sounding like that, I believe. I’d probably recognize it if I heard it again.”

  Huang tensed and pursed his lips. He mouthed a name, not speaking it out loud, as if afraid to have his suspicions confirmed.

  He remained silent, and still, and after a few long moments he felt Gamine pull her hand away. Then, much later, he eventually found slumber waiting for him in the quiet darkness.

  The next day, an airship was spotted not far from the camp. Huang, having some experience with aircraft, had carefully selected the camp’s current location at the base of a ravine, where the updrafts made it difficult for any airships to pass directly overhead. As a consequence, they were mostly protected against attacks from above. And given that the land rose sharply on either side, they were more or less hidden from the view of anyone approaching on the ground. But they were still visible to craft flying far enough from the ravine to avoid the updraft but high enough to see clearly over the edge of the rise, and it was in this narrow band that the airship appeared to have passed.

  The ravine was far enough from any military garrisons that it would take some time for a detachment to reach them, and the intelligence network of the Harmonious Fists had received no word of any battalions on maneuvers in the region. So they had a small amount of leeway before word from the airship reached the military authorities and troops were dispatched. But that leeway was not overly generous and would not last forever, so it was time for the camp to be on the move.

  Since the uprising had begun in earnest, the year before, the Fists had been playing a game of cat and mouse with the forces of the governor-general. Thankfully, the Fists seemed to take turns—sometimes as cat, sometimes as mouse—so that they were not constantly on the defensive. But the times when they played the role of the pursuer were limited to those occasions when the military forces were outnumbered or out-gunned, or could be outmaneuvered. Even with their numbers swelled to some thousands, there simply weren’t enough of the Fists to make a stand against the combined might of the Green Standard Army and the Bannermen alike, with their airships, crawlers, and heavy artillery in tow. And so the Fists had to select their fights carefully, and know when it was time to play the mouse and go scurrying for cover.

  Now was a time for mice, not cats.

  There were five crawlers in all in the camp—the red-painted crawler that had given Mama Noh’s opera company its name; the two crawlers in which Huang and the others had escaped the Bannermen who had ambushed them atop Mount Shennong; and two more captured in the course of their skirmishes with the military this last year. These newer, captured crawlers were in fact piecemeal assemblages from more than a half dozen different vehicles, since in each encounter the Fists had inflicted considerable damage on the military crawlers before the enemies abandoned them and fled. But while they were somewhat unsightly monsters, which in motion sounded even worse than they looked, they were perfectly functional and offered much-needed help in hauling the Fists’ stores of provisions and arms, with some small amount of room left over for those Fists who were too injured from recent encounters to move under their own power, mothers with newborn children, and so on.

  The Fists in motion made for a motley caravan: Five crawlers traveling in a line, with thousands of men, women, and children following beside and behind on foot. Along with them came the livestock they had captured, bought, or stolen over the seasons—goats that provided the milk the Fists drank, pigs that were fattened until they were ready for the table, even crates of chickens prized for their eggs while they still laid and for their flesh when they didn’t. In addition to the crawlers there were innumerous handcarts and wheel-barrows, rickshaws and wagons, all of them pulled and pushed by nothing more sophisticated than human muscle. On the move, the caravan kicked up an incredible amount of red dust, which was the main reason that Huang preferred to travel at night whenever possible, ideally under cloudy conditions or high winds.

 
Unfortunately, the military airship had been sighted in the early morning, and to wait until nightfall would put the Fists at an unnecessarily large risk, when the chances of pursuit and attack were already so high. And although the winds were high, the skies were cloudless and clear. Hardly the most auspicious of beginnings.

  There was no choice. Huang convened the inner circle in the command center, but not to invite debate, only to relay his orders. The Fists were to strike the camp immediately and prepare to head out before midday.

  With any luck, they’d been well on their way and difficult to track by the time the military arrived. If not? Well, it was best not to dwell too closely on the alternatives.

  The ravine in which the camp nestled was north of the western extremity of Tianfei Valley. While the others loaded the crawlers and carts, broke down tents and scaffolding, Gamine and Huang pored over maps of the surrounding terrain.

  “The airship retreated to the north, toward White Plains Station,” Gamine said, indicating the place marked at the top of the map.

  “No.” Huang shook his head. “That size airship isn’t rated to fly so far afield. It must be operating out of somewhere closer by.” He studied the map, then pointed to a hill much nearer their present location, marked with the ideograms for airfield. “There. Red Sands Basin. It’s small, with only a single company of Green Standard soldiers on site. I doubt the airship’s radio is powerful enough to reach any farther than that, so for the time being we can assume that they’re the only ones who know our position.”

  “Won’t the operators at Red Sands just relay it on to White Plains Station, or even Far Sight Outpost?”

  Huang grimaced, then gave a curt nod. “Yes. But they’re far enough away, even by airship, that I’m not too worried about their response just yet. It’s the troops at the airfield that worry me.”

  “Just a company, though?” Gamine looked up from the map and met Huang’s eyes. “That’s just four platoons, isn’t it? What is that, two and a half hundred soldiers?”

  Huang nodded. “Just about.”

  “We’re more than two thousand strong. Why should you be worried?”

  Huang shook his head in exasperation. “Two thousand, yes, but all infantry, and many of them only poorly trained. In a standing fight, we might just handle two hundred fifty professional soldiers, but only if they forget to bring their heavy armament from home. And if they bring crawlers with mounted cannon? We might as well forget about it. It wouldn’t take more than a handful of mounted crawlers to wipe us out entirely.”

  Gamine crossed her arms over her chest. She was tempted to say that the powers would protect them but knew that Huang wouldn’t respond well. And even she wasn’t sure if she’d have been joking to say it.

  “So where are we going, then?” Gamine finally asked. “If you’re right, it won’t take long for troops from Red Sands to get here.”

  Huang scowled and leaned in to study the map more closely.

  To the south and east stretched Tianfei Valley, where the three valley provinces were strung like beads on a necklace—too populated and well guarded. To the north and east was the Great Yu Canyon, where the highlands dropped precipitously down thousands of feet to the canyon floor far below—even if they could reach the canyon, there was no way down, and they’d be forced to divert days to the north just to get in. To the west were the highlands, with the Three Sovereigns mountains in the distance, and Bao Shan rising beyond—the high, rocky ground would offer little protection for a caravan on the march, and they’d be easy targets. All that was left was the south and west.

  “Forking Paths,” Huang said, indicating the mazelike tangle of ravines and box canyons that started just to the southwest of their current position. “It’s close enough that we might be able to get into the maze before the troops catch up with us. And if we can do that, there’s a good chance that we could lose them.”

  “And if we don’t?” Gamine asked.

  Huang looked up from the map and gave her a humorless smile.

  “In that case, we better hope they forgot to bring their crawlers and heavy arms along, is all I can think.”

  Gamine and Huang walked alongside their crawler as the sun dipped toward the western horizon ahead of them on the right.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Gamine asked, glancing sidelong at Huang. “You keep fidgeting.”

  Huang scowled and flapped his hands in front of him. “My fingers itch, if you must know.”

  Gamine narrowed her gaze. “Which fingers?”

  Huang glanced over at her, wearing a frustrated expression. “Which do you think?” He held up his left hand, his scowl deepening.

  On his left hand, Huang was missing all of his smallest finger and part of the next, while on his right hand his middle finger ended at the second knuckle. The three fingers were tipped with lumps of red scar tissue that had hardened into solid callus in the years since his injury. One night, during one of their quiet, tender moments of sharing, Huang had explained how he’d lost the fingers and what their loss had come to mean to him. The lost digits were a symbol of his connection to the bandits, most of whom had been scarred or disfigured in some way down in the mines. And so Huang never lamented the absence but carried it as a badge of honor.

  Still, there were times when Huang complained of phantom pains, of twinges and itches in the fingers that were no longer there. And since they were gone, there was nothing to scratch, and nothing to ease the discomfort.

  Gamine pursed her lips. “You know what that means.”

  “Not this again,” Huang answered, rolling his eyes. “Look, it’s nothing more than severed nerve endings misfiring, sending false signals through my nervous system. There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

  Gamine shook her head. Once, she might have agreed with him. She’d been just as analytical and rational as a child, and in her time as a confidence artist she’d learned that the simplest and most reasonable answer was almost always the correct one. Still, these days she couldn’t help but feel that there were sometimes meanings beyond the obvious, and explanations other than the most reasonable.

  “Have you forgotten already?” she asked. “Whenever you complain of your phantom pains, disaster or tragedy always follows. It isn’t just a question of misfiring nerve endings. The pain is a precursor to danger, a signal to alert us of some approaching threat.”

  “Oh, come on,” Huang said, his tone exasperated. “One time the ‘disaster’ came only a few hours after my phantom pains, I’ll admit, but another time it took weeks until the ‘prophesied danger’ came about. In our world, it doesn’t take any special foreknowledge to predict that something bad will eventually happen. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Gamine saw from his expression that there was nothing to be gained from pressing the issue. He was certain that it was nothing more than coincidence and no cause for concern. For her part, though, Gamine was far from convinced. Something bad was coming, she knew it now.

  “Look’s like luck is with us, Chief,” Jue said, handing Huang the binoculars, hanging on to a railing to keep from jostling off the crawler’s roof. “Or against us, if you want to look at it that way.”

  Huang squinted through the glasses at the column of men and machines marching at the head of the plume of red dust.

  “Looks like four squads,” he said, “maybe five.”

  “I make it at five,” Ruan said, scowling.

  Jue nodded in the skeletal bandit’s direction. “I counted five, as well, Chief.”

  Huang lowered the binoculars. “That’s no more than eighty soldiers, altogether.” He sighed. “Which would be lucky, if only . . .”

  He trailed off and glanced behind him at the Fists’ convoy. It would have been lucky, if the Fists had reached the safety of the Forking Paths by now. As it was, they were still woefully short, and the caravan was ill prepared to defend itself.

  “Come on,” Huang said, moving toward the hatch to clamber back down into the crawle
r. “Let’s tell the others.”

  Moments later, rejoining the other members of the council, Huang recounted what they had learned about the pursuing soldiers, and what that suggested for the caravan’s chances for survival.

  “They shouldn’t be on us yet, should they?” Mama Noh asked.

  Huang shook his head. “No,” he answered. “They shouldn’t.”

  Given the distances involved, even with the relatively slower speeds the Fists’ caravan was able to manage, they should have reached the Forking Paths labyrinth long before the soldiers arrived. Given the small number of troops, and the speed of their arrival, the only answer was that they had been on maneuvers in the area and had been radioed by the airship or by their command at Red Sands Basin to divert to the caravan’s location and engage.

  “How close are we?” Gamine asked.

  Huang knew all too well what she meant. “The head of the caravan has almost reached the entrance to the Forking Paths.” He sighed, tensing his hands into fists at his sides. “If the body of the caravan could get within the maze of canyons, our chances of eluding capture go up exponentially.”

  “I don’t see those squads giving us that kind of chance, chief,” Jue said.

  Ruan scowled and shook his head. “They’ll be here too soon for that.”

  Huang nodded. There was only one solution. It wasn’t a good one, but it was the only choice they had.

  “What?!” Temujin was the first to respond, but his shout of disbelief gave voice to the wide-eyed expressions all of them wore.

  “It’s the only way,” Huang said somberly. “Some of us will have to stay behind and delay the soldiers, to give the rest of the caravan time to get safely within the labyrinth.” He stood up and moved to open the crawler’s side hatch. “Come on, there isn’t any time to waste.”

  Huang leaped down to the ground, followed by the others, as the crawlers of the Harmonious Fists continued their slow but inexorable journey to the southwest. Squinting against the swirling clouds of dust, the leaders of the Fists regrouped, concluding their hasty council.