E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Toward evening, the coolies waded ankle deep. Premature rain, falling in the far off hills, had flooded an area before the harvesters could gather the crop, No need here for scorched earth. Famine was already on the way, and men and boys plunged into the mud and syrup-thick water, salvaging what they could. Sunrise to sunset, from year’s beginning to year’s end, there was rarely a day not given to outwitting hunger.

  Mu Lao’s shoulders sagged, and more from the weight of her task than from weariness. Seeing these men fight to save the shreds of a crop made her mission in Ching Pao seem impossible.

  * * * *

  Near sunset of the third day, the coolies stumbled toward the wall which enclosed the rammed earth houses of the families who owned the surrounding acres. This was home, and the sight and smell of it made her for a moment regret Cheng Teh. Then, as the tea shop loafers set down their cups to gape and point, marveling at the gilded sedan chair and the splendid person it sheltered, Mu Lan smiled a little, and held her head high.

  She had left this grimy village afoot, and to avoid marrying the village idiot. Far from postponing flight until her wedding day, she had shaken the dirt and dung of “Precious Gold” from her unbound feet the day after the betrothal feast, making her parents lose what little face they might have had. Nothing but instinct brought her back; instinct, and the urge to show her one-time people how to outwit the vicious barbarians from Japan.

  Mu Lan’s parents, driven by famine and revolt, had not been able to encumber themselves with a daughter agonized and helpless from bandaged feet and when the times finally permitted the family to return to Ching Pao, the girl’s feet had grown beyond binding. They could have sold her as a slave girl, rather than lose face by keeping their big-footed disgrace, but they had managed to avoid that solution, for, luckily enough, there was a neighboring family which would accept a bride who did not have “golden lilies.”

  Since the son was a half-wit, and the parents were as poor as Mu Lan’s, they had snapped at the chance.

  Thinking of these things, she smiled a little more and said to her amah, “Yu Tang, ask that yokel where the house of Chen Ah Tien is.”

  The amah had some difficulty in making herself understood. A crowd gathered, gaping, chattering, and spitting. They shook their heads, and marveled, saying, “Hai! What is this? Chen Ah Tien pretends to be poor, and see the concubine he’s buying!”

  The local money-lender brightened. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before he’d get possession of Chen Ah Tien’s acre, for when the number one wife is dead, it doesn’t take a young successor very long to settle an estate. He followed the village elders, when they called to give Chen Ah Tien indirect advice. Like them, he was shocked to hear that Mu Lan was not a concubine, but the village disgrace coming home to roost.

  There was even a greater shock when, upsetting the final shred of rice belt propriety, she boldly addressed her father’s callers. “The monkey men are coming, but there is still time to burn the rice and wreck the granaries and drive away the buffalo.”

  She had fully expected an outcry of incredulity, then of horror, and was prepared to explain herself: but this was needless. A hard-eyed young man with a bandaged arm and ugly scar which twisted one side of his face addressed Chen Ah Tien: “Honorable First Born, this lady brings from Cheng Teh the advice I bring from commander of the night-marching army. Burn what is dry, flood what is wet, break down what stands, drive away what can walk, and carry what you can. The barbarians come for food, and having not enough guns, we must starve those we can’t ambush. They come for rice, and without rice, they can’t march.”

  Like face and eyes, his voice was iron. Mu Lan, though used to monopolizing the spotlight, was grateful for an unexpected ally, particularly a man, and above all, a fighting man. But she had overlooked rural wit. An old man with stringy mustaches got up, bowed ceremoniously, and said, “Young Brother, we also will starve. And this young lady does not look hungry, she ate enough rice among the monkey men. Far better that we compromise.”

  Mu Lan’s jewels and silks and sleekness had betrayed her, and worse yet, she saw the cool amusement in the glance of Zeng Hai Wong, who as much as assured her, with a look, that despite her bungling, he was not whipped.

  Nor was he. Zeng’s wounds and scars and voice commanded respect, and so did his uncouth rural accent. A one-time farmer, he now harvested Japanese heads. Yet these were stubborn people, who could see no further than the neighboring village.

  “Gung ho!” he concluded. “Work together!”

  “Starve together,” they retorted, not mockingly, but rather, regretting the necessity of their logic. “When we leave with fire behind us, and what rice we can carry, will we be welcomed at the next village?”

  “The Generalissimo will feed you.”

  Zeng said this in good faith and certain truth, yet the retort was not slow: “But if the next village, and every other village destroys its crops, where does the Generalissimo get rice then?”

  He could not make them believe in the extent of China. He described, but they could not conceive of a land so broad that by dint of advancing into newly made desert, the invaders would finally have to halt or go beyond their own lines of supply; yet it was not amazing that farmers could scarcely picture the needs of an army, nor believe that anything so powerful was also vulnerable.

  “Fight them with scythes, that is good, and if we die, we die,” they agreed. “But that is not famine.”

  Simple enough, to be faced stoically, but they could not gulp the nonsense of a sing-song girl and of a guerilla agent who had more valor than sense. However much he told of what he and his kinsmen had endured in occupied areas, they still held that famine was the ultimate enemy, and particularly, self-made famine.

  The money-lender, having a stake in many a plot of rice, led the outcry, and then the old feud came into everyone’s mind, for Zeng had slipped sadly in mentioning the adjoining village.

  “We destroy what we have, and in Yin Pao, they do not destroy. And they eat what the little monkey men allow them, while we eat the nothing we have made ourselves. That is not wise.”

  Their bitter logic dismayed Mu Lan. No rapier play of wit could serve where the grim sincerity of Zeng Hai Wong failed. Then she rushed from the smoky room, and came back with all the money she had hoarded. She flung it to the rammed earth floor, and added her jewels to the heap. “This will buy your fields and your crops. Gold and may it choke you!”

  Her father jerked to his feet, regained his poise, and said, “My disgrace has become an idiot, do not listen.”

  She was Chen Ah Tien’s daughter, and her hoard belonged to him, and to whatever kinsmen might hear of it and come to town to share the family fortune. This was so well established, though long independence had made her forget it, that not a man of them considered her offer.

  But Zeng Hai Wong addressed Chen. “Consider, Prior Born, how much face you will gain, buying all the village lands and offering them as a sacrifice to the ancestors. And how much face the misers of Yin Pao will lose if they don’t make an equal sacrifice.”

  There was a growing mutter, first of wonder, then of approval as they saw the possibilities. The village would win either renown or cooperation.

  Mu Lan was thinking, triumphantly, “My jewels, his wit.” For the first time in her life, she had met a man whose thought kept ahead of her own.

  But she had not reckoned on Confucius. The eldest of the elders announced, “The Master Kung said, think before you act, and act before you speak. I would not willingly associate with a man who would empty-handed fight a tiger, or cross a river without a boat, or die without regret.”

  Mu Lan flared up, “And the Master Kung also said, First Born, a man must have humiliated himself before he is humiliated by others: A nation must have defeated itself before it is defeated by others. And how can you better defeat yourself than by feeding your enemy?
The ancestors of any of you would have committed honorable suicide to call to heaven’s attention the oppression of an unjust mandarin. Why not a village destroy itself to bring heaven down on the monkey men?”

  “Heaven has no favorites,” the village wise man retorted. “And if we join the monkey men, perhaps we can each of us cover our floors with gold.”

  The ironic quirk of his voice brought laughter. She lost face, and so did Zeng Hai Wong for having supported her argument. Ridicule drove Mu Lane from the room, and according to tradition, it should have silenced Zeng Hai Wong, but he stood firm, and he said, “I will prove this for heaven to witness. My honorable suicide, going to the enemy’s camp to kill their general. Then perhaps you can kill a field.”

  The silence which followed his leaving told Mu Lan that he had won, and that through him, she also had won. Then her victory became a coldness and an emptiness: for they had believed him because they had not been able to doubt that he had devoted himself to death.

  There was no smoke to redden the sun on that day, or the day which followed; whatever Zeng Hai Wong’s fellow-agents had said and done, they had not succeeded in scorching any earth belonging to the villages between Ching Pao and Cheng Teh. And the Japs were on the march. Swift-racing rumor, and the flights of bombers and fighters coming out of the southwest to harass the enemy made that clear enough.

  Zeng lounged in the tea shop and played mahjong. The failure of his fellows to the east had apparently pulled the teeth of his resolution. When he went to keep his word, it would be too late. There was nothing he could do: for if he went to meet the invaders, already delayed by guerillas, he would find his fate too far from Ching Pao to convince the skeptical farmers.

  And he might escape alive, in which case, heaven would not be the least interested. The sensible thing to do about radical proposals was to let the other fellow try them.

  But Mu Lan had her thoughts. In the first place, a wounded man could not possibly get through the enemy lines. He’d be suspected of guerilla activity. They’d not even bother to question him. A sing-song girl, however, had a chance to do her work, and escape. Since a woman amounted to nothing at all, her survival would not affect the issue any more than would her death. Heaven simply wouldn’t notice.

  But the villagers might; and if she settled the commanding officer, there would be no occasion for Zeng Hai Wong to make a sacrifice which she now felt would be useless. Had the enemy approached only a few days sooner, Zeng’s resolution would have had weight, but now time had dulled the edge of his words.

  Zeng was useful. He should not waste himself.

  She went to the market, and made a great show of buying red bands. It was noised about that Chen Ah Tien’s disgrace was going to make the gesture of binding her feet. While she could hardly cripple them at her age, they were exceptionally small, and only a little cramping would satisfy convention.

  The coolies, homesick for Cheng Teh, trotted eastward with the empty sedan chair. It gleamed bravely, all gilt and red and tasseled, exhaling the perfume of its one-time occupant. The villagers said, “So she didn’t own it, after all.” Others laughed and said, “She sacrifices a chair, we sacrifice our fields.”

  But Mu Lan was not there to hear their irony. She was one of two ragged women who trudged eastward along the flagstone trail. Both were bent double under bundles. Her father would not miss her for some hours. Then let them all guess.

  The coolies lagged. That night, Mu Lan and her amah overtook them at the first inn, a good many li to the east.

  In the morning, Mu Lan wore her silks and her jewels; her hair-do was perfect. She was exactly as she had been on her arrival at her old home, except for one detail—her feet were bound, mercilessly, torturingly, a sample of the three years of torment she had escaped in childhood.

  Well, she’d avoided marrying the village idiot, and now it was nice to think of Zeng Hai Wong. She’d often think of him. She might even see him, some day, though a guerilla’s grave was always open.

  The coolies were not worrying. The worst that could happen to them would be some forced labor, and there was always the chance of escape, and flight to Cheng Teh, where their advance pay waited at their hong. Their only complaint was the jam of refugees on the flagstone trail. There was no shooting. The guerillas worked from the flanks, chewing off unwary detachments, luring them into blind ravines, or knee deep mud.

  Finally Mu Lan had a chance to try the pass which General Yasuda had given her that night in Cheng Teh. A non-com, recognizing the official seal, did not bother to read the details. As for the interior guard, her presence spoke for itself.

  She demanded to see the general. The splendor of her dress and polished haughtiness of her manner protected her.

  Yasuda, despite his rank, was well to the front. Since he had to make a showing, it behooved him to leave little or nothing to subordinates, and thus Mu Lan faced the ultimate test sooner than she expected.

  While waiting at his headquarters tent, she lost, as she expected, both coolies and the gilded sedan chair. Then, in the private tent, a slave girl searched Mu Lan, and finding no weapons, took the long pins from her head gear. When she went to greet the general, she had not even her maid with her.

  Yasuda had to deny to himself that Mu Lan had once outwitted him, even though the information she had gained had been useless. She wondered where the Nazi observer was, and what he would have done in Yasuda’s place. And then she said, “I have canceled many engagements to sing for your excellency.”

  “So now you have golden lilies?”

  “I am retiring. This is my farewell performance. For you.”

  “Thank you. But this time, if you insist on playing chai mui, the forfeit is hot saki and not rice brandy.”

  She laughed, and spoke of the pig-faced man and the murderous headache he must have had: and Yasuda was happy, remembering how the Nazi had been the first to collapse.

  An orderly gestured to the attendants, and then drew the tent flap. Outside, an army; inside, a gentleman of Nippon, who wondered whether he had become as Chinese as his favorite dishes.

  She sang, and without musicians. Her pantomime made him follow the slender hands, each of which seemed to have a life of its own. It took an artist to appreciate art.

  He found an interpretation for the dainty gesture toward a jade pendant, and ignored the possibility of a second meaning. The hands rippled on, weaving their part of a story told by face and voice and step.

  His glance followed her as she shifted. Though he did not know it, Mu Lan had designed for him to turn, and upset the porcelain saki-jar. And she was ready, catching it by the neck before it broke or even spilled more than a gulp.

  “And now,” she wheeled, “see if you can beat me at chai mui.”

  He could not. He had never taken that strenuous course of charm, which included the finesse of beating wealthy aristocrats at that popular after dinner game; sober on saki, he was no more skillful than when drunk on ng ka pay. If for no other reason, eye and hand and voice were always a little out of step for he was distracted by the concealment and primness of that high-collared silken tunic, far more devastating than any décolleté.

  And the opiate she had not needed in Cheng Teh now served its purpose. He had lost five games to her one, and he could not stand five times the drug.

  Mu Lan continued her mirth and her gestures, mimicking the male falsetto and giggle of the unconscious Jap. The lights were low, and there would be no betraying shadows against the canvas. So under cover of the noisy game, she had one hand free to unbind her tortured feet.

  Still calling numbers, she twisted the bands to make a cord, and she did her work to a double take of laughter. Strangling does not take great strength or much time.

  Then she glanced about. The final thought which came to her at the end should have come from the beginning, yet she was still glad that she had used foot bindi
ngs. Her search was short. Habit and tradition favored her. A Japanese gentleman’s sword can never be far from him. She found it, drew it, cut once, and put out the light.

  Now that it was done, her feet claimed their due. Better even have married an idiot than be a lady!

  Finding her amah was beyond trying, so, since Yu Tang, who might have carried the unexpected head back to China Pao, was not there, Mu Lan had to hobble with it as best she could.

  She took off her conspicuous head gear and jewels. Muffled in a long quilted jacket, she set out, pass in one hand, and a compact bundle in the other. As verification, she had even taken Yasuda’s insignia.

  Her luck held until the interior guard was well behind her, but as she approached the outposts, there was a shot, followed by a challenge, and the groan of a man mortally wounded. Sentries at adjoining posts quite needlessly passed on the alarm. A non-com answered, and brought a detachment of the guard. A large disturbance about nothing at all: not a raid but a solitary prowler, who no longer made any sound.

  Either he was dead, or had taken cover.

  An officer wanted to know all about it. While listening to explanations, he sensed rather than saw the vague movement when Mu Lan made the mistake of trying to slip past under cover of the distraction. Zeng Hai Wong would have waited.

  A yell—a challenge—the blaze of a flashlight, and the thin, spiteful snap of a six millimeter pistol. A second and a third shot. She felt the bite of the puny slugs. Her stride broke, but she recovered, and prayed for the life to return to her aching feet.

  The blundering pursuit was brought up sharply by the officer, who said, “Just another camp follower. Woman. Get back to your posts.”

  By now Mu Lan knew where she had been hit. She coughed, and the taste of blood was plain in her mouth. What worried her most was that leg. Given time, she might get to Ching Pao, but she had no time, for they would miss the general’s head in the morning.

  “Mu Lan,” someone said in an iron whisper. “Mu Lan!”