He dozed, and started awake, heartsore, and stamped his feet and ran in place to keep himself warm. At dawn he saw a line of stunted poplars grow into the light and take form. He saw miles of hills and swales, pockets of deep shadow and the bright flow of hilltops where the first light struck. The poplars seemed to sway. He repeated his proverb. He did not see how he could buy his way back. He did not see what he could do now, ever, that would make him even half a man again.
Again the poplars swayed. He uncased his binoculars, scanned the horizon, watched the poplars shift.
They were advancing as well as swaying and they were not poplars.
His hands shook. He focused the glasses and saw a line of men on horseback. Two scouts rode before, out wide.
He waited in the swelling light. Below him by the Yarkand River the dead woman lay. What he did now would be his offering to her. It would make him, in his own eyes, even less than no man at all, but there was no easy or prideful way. Maybe there was no way at all.
In time he saw the slung rifles, and the discipline of the column. He could not distinguish faces or clothing, but he whispered, “K’uang!”
He freed his pony, settled his pack, weapons and gear, including two spare clips and a bandoleer, four grenades, a canteen of water and one of wine, and mounted up. He sat his pony on the knoll and kept watch to the north. He removed his sheepskin hat, and fluffed his blond hair. He waited. Soon the column halted, and two men dismounted. They raised binoculars, and him; he raised his own, and glassed them. The two men mounted, and the column picked up speed.
Jake walked his pony down the knoll, nodded a last salute at the woman’s grave, and lashed the pony into the freezing waters of the Yarkand River. It was swift and narrow here, and the pony was swept downstream, but he found footing on the far bank. Jake made a wide cast to the west and then veered south, toward the mountains, and kicked the pony into a trot. By true sunrise he would be lost in the folds of the foothills.
Some time later he heard much shooting, a distant, playful sound like firecrackers.
33
He rode climbing, followed the river upstream, detouring at rapids and falls but returning always to the river because now it was all he had, his only landmark. In a few days he would not know for sure what country he was in. But others had come this way. There was the shadow of a trail, and he saw cairns and signs, stones heaped by the hand of man.
The rise of the land was quick, and his pony struggled. By the evening of the second day the pony was crashing through lacy ice at the edges of the stream, and slipping on patches of snow, and Jake was hungry. He was also talking to himself, aloud, because there was not much else to do. He could talk to his pony, and did, but it was not satisfactory, first because the pony had no name, then because he never answered, and then because Jake felt bad riding him up and up into this freezing waste of rock and snow, pretty soon not even trees to nibble on. “Can’t even tell you where we’re headed, old boy. India, maybe. Right now I would like to see one of those wild asses. Never saw a wild ass the whole time, much less ate one. Best eating west of Peking, somebody said. Hell, maybe they’re all gone. Extinct. Like us. We got to find you a name …”
The hunger kept him alert: to signs of game, but there were none; to signs of K’uang, but there were none; and to the weather, and there was plenty of that. Squads of thin gray clouds marched up from the southeast, and the wind was bittersweet, a cold wind running down off the mountains, but with eddies and layers of warmth, like a lake where your feet would be warm and your belly cold. Jake blessed all sheep: he was sheepskin from top to toe, including gloves.
A couple of days, and no more forage for his pony. A couple of days more, and no more jerky for himself. By then he would have crossed a rich caravan headed for Kashmir. The last of the season. They would be herding a few live animals for meat, and there would be bags of flour, and delicate tea from the high mountains. No: they brought tea in, around here. Jade, then, and gold dust and mountain furs. Maybe fruit, packed tight and the nippy air keeping it fresh.
Or he would find a customs hut, well stocked, abandoned for the winter.
“I guess I better call you Skinny,” he said to the pony one evening, “or Ribs. You beginning to look like Job’s turkey.” He checked his heading often. For three days, or four, it was hard to keep count, he rode southwest, climbing always; then southeast, the wind in his face. The river was important. Men lived along rivers. He figured he had ridden a hundred miles or more on this sheep’s intestine of a trail, and about two miles straight up. Maybe three. There was a difference in the breathing. Old Ribs labored and wheezed.
Jake was famished. For a day or two the hunger was like an iron hand squeezing his stomach. He did his best not to dream of steaks, pea soup and bowls of spaghetti. Finally he gave himself free rein, and ordered visions from an endless menu. He ate snow, and could salivate forever. He ate it slowly, a finger’s worth at a time, not wanting to freeze an empty belly.
He imagined an iron vat full of Head of Pot’s sheep stew, and the flavors and smells were a millionaire’s delight. The remembrance dizzied him. After pondering, he decided the dizziness was real, of his body and not of his mind.
At night he bashed through the surface ice and watered Ribs. All day long he uprooted the rare stunted shrubs, and at dusk he found a hollow, or sheltered under an overhang, and built a small fire.
He decided he was fooling himself, and was really on his way to nowhere, and would fall asleep in a drift someday when he had eaten old Ribs and run out of matches. He was doing one thing only, pushing on, and was otherwise empty and not worth small change. So he was oddly cheerful. “Hell, this is a trail,” he said. “A trail goes to a place.” Later he said, “Hell, I’ll walk to India if I have to. Wherever that is.” He felt light-headed, wide-eyed and stupid, better off not understanding. A village idiot. Also his side hurt, where he had been shot, and his back where he had been slashed.
On the sixth day, maybe, a gloomy day, cold and overcast, he slopped water into a boot. He had kept Ribs hugging the northwest slope of a ridge, mostly out of the wind, and slid him down to the river for rest and refreshment, and the ice gave way.
“Hell,” he said, and led Ribs to a sheltered niche. Ribs was a bay, a tough little pony once nice to look at. He was also food. These days Jake saw dull mutiny in his eyes. “You just stand guard,” Jake said. Breathing in great gulps, he sat down, took off his jacket, removed the boot, drained the water and dried his foot on the jacket’s fleece.
“Now how we going to dry this boot?” he asked the pony. He left his foot wrapped in the jacket and leaned back, bone-tired and puffing white plumes. “Don’t know what to do. Might be we ought to go back down this hill and take our chances. You stand still a minute.”
He hopped to the pony and unlashed his pack. Ribs whickered softly, and for a few seconds Jake stood rubbing him behind the ears: a pearly gray sky and a skinny frozen pony and one tired sojer, rifle and grenades and bandoleer lying on the ground useless, pistol at his belt, inedible, spare clip, full, in his pocket, and a heavy pack dangling from one hand, and his breath steaming, and the pony’s, too, and in the whole frozen world nothing else moved.
Jake hopped back to shelter, collapsed, tugged his jacket on and groped in his pack. “Now lookee there,” he said, pulling out a cloth shoe. “That’s a genuine Peking shoe.” The shoe fit snug enough but the sole was too wide, too stiff, to slip into the boot. Jake whittled away at it, and trimmed it down to a ragged sock. He rummaged for a green skivvy shirt. “Horse marines always there when you need them.” He made a legging of the skivvy shirt. He jammed it all—foot, sock, legging—into the boot. “Hell,” he said, stomping, “that’s pretty good.” He stood panting. He went to pat Ribs, and Ribs sidled.
“Easy now,” Jake said. He stepped forward to reach for the reins but Ribs backed off.
Jake stood still and talked sweet. “Let’s just make it through tonight. Tomorrow we got sunshine comin
g, a warm spell. That’s a promise.”
Ribs whinnied, and backed onto the ice. It cracked beneath his hoofs; he lunged, and scrabbled to firmer ice. Between Jake and Ribs a line of water frothed. Ribs turned and trotted off.
“Now don’t do that,” Jake said. “You got no other friend in the world, you hear?”
Ribs ignored him, cried out like a man in pain, stumbled and showed teeth.
Jake gathered his gear and followed. He tested the ice, and detoured upstream where it seemed firmer. Cautiously he edged across. Once he was away from the ridge, the wind curled down on him, dank and shrewd.
Ribs was well ahead of him. Jake left the ice and struggled up a snowy bank. His pack weighed a ton, and the air was no nourishment; he pumped it into his lungs frantically and it was never enough. He topped the bank in time to see Ribs fall.
Jake tried to hurry. He dropped his pack and sprinted, but his feet were leaden and the snow was icy. He slipped and plunged. Ribs slid slowly. The reins were trailing up toward Jake and there was a chance; Jake drove himself forward. The slope was steep; Ribs gathered speed. Jake lunged, flung a hand toward the trailing rein. He missed it by a man’s length.
Ribs screamed, sliding down the slope; his legs thrashed. Jake lay prone, gulping air, and watched the pony go. It was a long slope, a quarter-mile anyway, with a drop at the bottom: Ribs slid down, faster and faster, and hit the edge and just disappeared. Fell out of the world into a ravine or a valley.
Jake sat up. All about him he saw snow-capped mountains. “There goes a lot of meat,” he said. “There goes a month’s worth of groceries.”
He unhooked the left-hand canteen and shook it; the last of the wine gurgled. Clumsily he screwed the cap off. He lay back and poured the wine into his throat. He sat up then and threw the canteen down the slope. It clattered, bounced and slid.
Jake’s ribs and back hurt. He thought he might be bleeding.
Later the wind died, and Jake thanked God. “For small favors. You really giving me hell in all other respects.” The wind picked up immediately.
He understood that he was about to die. Not within minutes, but soon enough. Hours, maybe. He was trudging uphill in late afternoon, toting all his gear like a miser on Judgment Day. The gray sky was thicker and lower.
Not supposed to have much snow here, he reassured himself. Not much rain in this part of the world, therefore not much snow. What does fall, sticks awhile.
He was blinking in the wind, and reeling.
Considering death, he found himself not scared. Annoyed, yes. A pain in the ass, to say the least. “But a little deep sleep never hurt the weary wayfarer. God damn. How oft is the candle of the wicked put out.” With the weather closing in he would have to choose: ridge or valley. The wind blew the snow thinner on ridges, but it also froze the bones. In a valley he could hope for shelter, but maybe drifts too. Either way he would starve.
The wind decided him: it was blowing a half-gale and knifing right through to his sweetbreads.
He turned, heaving for breath, turned to look back down the long, hard road he had come, as if he might be able to see all the way back to the foothills, even to the plain, all the way to green Yarkand where the river ran wide, slow and friendly, and the orchards drank in sunlight.
“That’s a long, long way,” he said, and then he said, “Holy Jesus Christ and hsüüü!” because about a mile behind him a man on horseback was crossing a rise, and some yards from him another, and then a line of them, Jake counted a dozen, looming one by one out of the white hills, picking their way, little bundles of man-horse like a file of warriors in a scroll painting.
It warmed a man, it did, to be that sought-after. They would shoot him on the spot, most likely. Unless he was worth more alive—those thirty ounces of gold. But money would not matter to K’uang.
They would have food, rations. They would bivouac and build a fire.
Fumbling, stiff-fingered, he hauled out the binoculars. He flopped prone in a hump of snow.
Traveling light and traveling tight: twelve men, twelve ponies. Sheepskins and furs, probably, and half asleep.
So: no mount for Jake. He would stumble along behind, bound. “Seems to me I did that,” he mumbled. Sons of bitches might not even feed him.
Suppose you take out one or two. Look for K’uang, or number one, anyway, whoever that is, and put one through the fat part of him.
While Jake’s mind worked strategy, his hands worked tactics: he set his gloves aside, unslung the rifle, checked the clip and safety, opened the bolt a fraction and let it spring shut.
And where does this get you? Farther up the mountain, without a paddle. So you slow them up. Terrific.
He was drunk with hunger and fatigue, and he built his thoughts laboriously.
But if you turn yourself in, they tie you up and abuse you some more. Cut off your trigger finger, or your nose or some damn thing. Or hang you. We had enough hangings this year.
Where’s the consul when you need him?
He was warmer now. Warm with danger, but also because he was once more engaged in honest labor—namely, digging in and fighting foreign soldiers.
Half a mile down the mountain, the column pressed toward him.
“You old bastard,” he said. “K’uang, you old soldier. Some happy day you and me going to fight on the same side.”
With the glasses he confirmed: two scouts out front, a third some way behind, and then K’uang; K’uang himself and no other.
K’uang was dropping back, checking his column.
The light was diffuse, so Jake would not fret about optical distortion. He was firing downhill but not enough to matter. Three hundred yards was a comfortable range and his favorite. Not firing into the next county, but nobody pointing a bayonet at you, either.
He laughed, foolish, tipsy with the love of all this. He remembered the rifle range in boot camp, rapid fire … fahr! and the corporal saying later, “Five in the black, boy, can’t ask for more.”
Okay, gunny, and what you planning to do about this half-gale? Maybe thirty knots, sailor, what do you do about a thirty-knot cross wind? How many clicks?
Tell you what you do, boot, you pretend that man’s moving sideways thirty miles an hour, and you lead him to windward, that’s what you do, and never mind the clicks.
He understood suddenly that they were on his tracks, real tracks, Jake’s footprints, and he hoped they were not the kind of trackers who could say, Seven minutes ago and a callus on the right heel.
No. They came on. From there Jake would be a rock in the snow.
He sighted. The column snaked on. He flexed his fingers.
He was sighting to the right of the lead scout, and waiting the last few seconds, when a shot scared the bejesus out of him, and the lead scout stood up in his stirrups, tall and astonished, and pitched over backward.
Jake had not fired. For half a second he froze, and then the sergeant in him took over: he swung his front sight fast and took out the second scout.
A third shot echoed his own, and the trail was empty. Only the two ponies, racing downhill, dragging the two dead scouts. Not three seconds had passed.
Jake had fired only once. He hugged the snow. Danger all around him now, no telling who or where. He followed his aim up and down the trail, and along the ridges.
Until a giant snowflake blotted out the front sight.
He eased the rifle off his cheek. He saw a screen of snow; time to close up shop for the day. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the borning storm. From an opal sky huge flakes fell softly, endlessly; listening, he seemed to hear a gentle white hiss as they drifted down.
Closing him in, friendly and peaceable. Covering his tracks. This was a good time to push along, if he could see where he walked. To put some space between him and K’uang, and between him and whoever else that was. Somebody in these hills with a rifle. Somebody who shot at soldiers and not at Jake.
Maybe didn’t know I was there. Came up a side trail, saw
the soldiers. Well, he knows now.
Damn, that’s good! Just one single other human being out there! And not a bad shot, either. Poor old K’uang. One at a time, gents. Plenty death to go around.
The storm drove him on; wind and snow lashed at his back. In the lee of banks and ridges the wind dropped, and the snow floated gently to him. He was edging his way down a valley, moving northwest, he supposed, though directions were no longer of any importance, like languages and table manners.
He wondered if that sniper had food. Some Tibetan, maybe. That abominable snowman, maybe, what they called a yeti, like a big red-headed bear stomping through the mountains hollering, Yankee go home. Maybe he would track Jake and break out the hot noodles. Or that little fatty yellow piece of sheep’s gut would go fine about now. There was not much left to Jake. That wee little firefight had used up some of his glands, some last bits of sugar and moxie.
Also the light was fading. He was kicking through fluffs of snow, but the drifting was not serious. Easy did it, and a sure foot. His muscles strained and folded like cardboard, and ached. On will alone he had come five miles or more; he might be circling. The valley seemed to run as valleys do, a long straight path slightly downhill. In the lee of the south wall snow swirled but did not assault.
He sensed an overhang, and hugged the wall. The shelter was not a cave, only an indentation, but the sudden absence of wind and snow, and thicker silence, made him feel at home.
He slipped out of his pack and rifle, sat back and yawned. He ached all over. He had nothing to burn. A few matches, plenty of cartridges and therefore powder, and no wood. The case of his binoculars was some sort of fiber: he could slice it and try to nurse a blaze. The stock of his rifle was wooden, but a fighting man gave up his weapon last of all. A gentleman and archer. A bullshit merchant from the west. Get rich quick with Dodds. Five hundred million customers. Where were they all? Never mind that. Your own fault, gunny, nobody else’s; not Dushok’s, Kao’s, Ugly’s, K’uang’s or God’s.
The Chinese Bandit Page 24
