by Kin S. Law
Even before he arrived, he knew he had guessed rightly. Quail were swift-born, dumb beasts, and did not respect the rules of man. Their droppings heeded rules even less. The path was dripping with them, and just before the entrance he found one of the birds fluffed up and sleeping on a ledge. He put it inside his barrel, and hung the fluttering barrel from a rusted nail, outside.
“Ten,” he counted quietly.
It was dark, and the plank boards of the window were splintery, yet the suite of rooms occupying a whole level at this corner of the City was unguarded. Who would dare storm the Century Syndicate headquarters at night? Yet the boy had often crossed near, witnessed deeds done and men undone here. He had never set foot in the place, but everyone knew where the society men were.
Silently, carefully, he put a bare foot onto the lush carpet of the Syndicate’s parlor. There was a woman, nude and pale in the moonlight, but sweating from the southern Chinese humidity. A man lay beside her, on a wood sofa wide enough to sleep the boy’s whole family. One of the woman’s feet dangled off the cushions, and three of the birds were pecking at something near it.
“Seven,” he whispered, slipping them into his ragged shirt.
The soft sound of snoring could not obscure the scuffle of birds’ claws, and Albion followed them through the rooms, gathering the quail up wherever they were.
“Six.”
“Five. Four.”
He ignored the riches about him, and the cruel men with their watermelon knives and jars of vitriol. They splayed out beside naked “chickens,” ginseng wines for vitality open on the table. Lines of poison powders crawled around them. Though the boy had seen the men at work, his fear of them was no more than the fear of his father. Trapped between two equally terrifying creatures, the small boy was somehow stripped of fear.
There was a Buddhist monk in one of the many rooms of the Walled City. He was a bald-headed fellow mostly ignored for his talk of pacifism and vegetarianism in a place where a person’s hard-won meal might very well consist of his ill-fated neighbor. The boy had seen the monk talk once, of something he called “present mind.” Surrounded by knives still browned by old blood, the boy thought he understood a little of what the monk had meant.
“Three. Two.”
His shirt nearly overflowed with feathery warmth, but the seams were good and sewn by his mother. Over the muffled murmur of their calls, he could hear the last of them down a corridor on his left. As he crossed the doorway, something did not seem right to him. Yet the boy was focused on the last bird, and wasted no time putting his finger on it.
“Come on, stupid bird. Appear, and I can go home and sleep.”
The boards wobbled beneath his feet, then, but the boy did not think it was strange. The Walled City was ill-constructed, and the floors oft slanted or felt loose. He simply concentrated on placing each palm and foot down, as if his limbs were padded and silent.
His last bird was hidden behind some crates, in the back of the wobbly room. Albion was thin, and scrawny, but even he could not reach between them. Beady eyes taunted him from between splintery planks. He looked, but it seemed the only way was to go around, under some of the smaller crates.
When the hard weight toppled onto him, the boy didn’t even feel it. All he felt was the puff of feathers, as those nine birds in his shirt tumbled free.
Those loosely stacked crates determined the boy’s destiny.
When he awoke, it was to those same crates jostling about, crushing him against the walls. Small, and a relatively flexible tumbler, the boy who would be Albion rolled out from under them, trying not to be too disgusted by all the bird leavings stuck to his clothes.
He had no idea what was happening. Had the Kowloon Walled City fallen around him? The mass of illegitimate, illegal dwellings were hastily built, but the boy could not imagine them falling, not in a million years. He had never been in a place like this before. None of the thick wooden beams made sense to him, and there were no rotten boltholes for him to hide in. The walls were strong, and thick, and bolted together with metal plates, unlike the thin plaster of the City.
His sandals beat a hasty pace across the room, and through to another, and another. They were filled with crates and barrels, some of which had burst open. There were bottles and paper packages on the floor, bundles of food and pottery jars of water. All the rooms looked the same, but as he traversed them, he thought he could feel the tilt of them a little more clearly. Later, an older Albion would call this “getting his air legs,” but for the boy who would grow to be the Manchu Marauder, all of this was new.
At the end of the rooms full of crates, there was a stairway, just as tilted as the rest of the rooms. The boy climbed them apprehensively, clinging to the splintery steps with his bare toes. He was deathly afraid of what lay above. What if the Syndicate men were there? Would they accuse him of stealing? They would chop off his hands with cleavers. Yet, there was nothing for him down here, the boy knew instinctively. He had to push forward, or be crushed by the heavy shapes in the dark.
When he reached the top of the stair, he simply stood there, in shock. He was standing on another wooden floor, only there was clear sky around him, unframed by the buildings of the Walled City. Someone had taken down the walls and ripped the sky open. Maybe the same someone had set fire to everything below, lighting the sky with the blaze of everything the boy had ever known. Before he knew it, the wooden floor was tipping once again. The boy found himself tipping with it, inexplicably, head over heels into thin air.
An older Albion found out, much later, what had actually happened. The Hong Kong government, ostensibly a part of Imperial Canton but actually on a hundred-year loan to the Pax Brittania, had had enough of the wanton lawlessness of the Kowloon Walled City. They had mounted an attack on its crime lords with engines, flying cogs and armed soldiers, firebombing the worst of the corruption and cutting away the rest with bayonets. The Britons had little sympathy for those Chinese innocents still trapped inside. Like a pile of oily rags coming into contact with a lit match, the place had erupted into a blazing inferno.
The boy Albion had stumbled onto a small dirigible docked at the Walled City. Its hold had been open and connected to the Syndicate’s den. When the attack began, the Syndicate men had crowded aboard and cut the airship loose. Halfway out over the flames, one of the British engines had spotted the rats deserting ship. They launched firebombs at the little craft, upending it and tipping the boy overboard.
The boy knew none of this. What he knew was he was falling, and maybe burning. He could certainly feel the heat of the flames washing over him, a vast plateau of heat exactly as large as the Kowloon Walled City. It smelled, too, of smoke, piss, and poverty.
All of a sudden, he was disgusted. He knew he should care about the little knot of people somewhere in the City, those people he had lived with all his life, those who shared his blood. Everyone had told him so. The Chinese were a people who never forgot where they came from. Their holidays were all about remembering those who came before, visiting graves, keeping old heroes alive, remembering debts generations old. Their future was more of the same: living, breeding, going about their business, heads ducked down.
But now, as he faced his doom, the boy who would be Albion simply did not care. It seemed like all those precious things were worth exactly nothing. All those people in the Kowloon Walled City treasured exactly those things, but there they all were, stuck in a festering hole together, burning. When had his ancestors ever left him anything but pain, hard work, and suffering? His own father had refused to forgive him, and sent him to this stupid, meaningless death. If he had his older voice, he might have screamed at them, something like “Fuck you. You can all go to hell. I lived eleven years and not once did any of you precious ancestors help me!” right before he hit the cold shock of Victoria Harbor.
What they told him, when he woke up shivering and cold on another unfamiliar airship deck, was piecemeal and disjointed. He only remembered the warm tou
ch of a hand at his back, and the taste of hot cocoa. It was the first time he had ever had it, and the smell shook his whole world.
Later, Albion would rediscover his birth people’s fineries, tea being paramount. But just then, with Auntie’s chocolate and Auntie’s bowl of chicken soup, it seemed like the boy had been living in a world completely shut off from reality. Everything in Kowloon seemed at the bottom of a well, and the little piece of sky he had seen from it was suddenly all around him. He could see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Everything was fresh, new, and wonderful, and he wanted more of it. He would give his right arm to have more of it, new tastes, new cultures, a new life.
The ship was called The Huckleberry; her captain, Samuel Jebediah Clemens of Jackson, Mississippi. He was a proud man with a proud brown mustache, with a penchant for cigars and Winchester rifles. He spoke in a slow drawl, smelled of his sickening bottles, and disliked children. It was hard to understand why his crew was so devoted to him, until they sailed over the remains of the Walled City. Captain Sam asked the boy, in halting Cantonese, which part of the massive phalanx of dwellings he called home. The boy pointed to a section of the City gutted and black, and the captain merely grunted and said:
“That’s no place I’d leave even a dog. You’re coming with me, boy.”
Passage aboard The ’Berry was not free. The boy helped Auntie with her myriad shipboard tasks, followed Cid Tanner around running wrenches and loosing bolts. The captain, in his spare time, taught him the rudiments of navigation, and shooting, and most importantly, what scraps of language he could. Days were long, and nights no less tiring than in the Walled City, but the boy was learning, and moving, and it made all the difference in the world.
It didn’t take the boy long to figure out Captain Sam was a pirate. The Walled City supplied many of the same type, and the boy had long ago learned crooks were not always untrustworthy. The only difference was Sam was a crook who traveled, and all travelers are great lovers of books. As soon as he had his English letters, the boy began attacking the captain’s stash of books in the hold. It was a veritable mountain of literature gathered from every corner of the world.
Flying from port to port, devouring what knowledge he could in his spare moments, the boy eventually built some understanding of his place in the world. Kowloon and Hong Kong culture was very different from even the Imperial Canton or the Mandarin Commonwealth. It befuddled him when he discovered his ancestral brethren shared none of the practices he took for granted. The ruling British had influenced how he and his family behaved, from afternoon tea in the dank, greasy tearooms of the Kowloon Walled City to their everyday courtesies towards neighbors. Those same mannerisms seemed to serve him better in a world mostly conquered by the Britons’ dirigible fleets. Besides, he was now picking up brand new habits from the motley crew of the ’Berry.
The name was no accident.
“Albion,” the boy said to the captain one evening at the dinner table. The captain had looked up from cleaning his rifle, and grunted inquisitively.
“It’s what I’m calling myself,” Albion insisted, stabbing at his trout. He was still wondering if he should keep his father’s name.
“Albion Clemens. I like it,” Sam had grunted in reply, tossed back a dram of bourbon, and gone back to cleaning his gun. Albion never felt anything like he felt then, and never would again.
It wasn’t all gallivanting about and performing acts of daring villainy. Often the life of piracy involved sitting or sailing for long stretches of monotony. It was the perfect environs for reading, or playing chess with Cid, or learning how to perfectly poach eggs with Auntie. Yet, as Albion rushed about fulfilling his elders’ amused requests, he often looked towards the forecastle, where Captain Sam could be seen gazing forlornly out over the cloud ocean.
Between the hijackings and smugglings, the captain of The ’Berry was a haunted man. Albion saw he was a man of honor, no doubt about it. He never killed unless he needed to, preferring to leave his foes a chance, no matter how slim. He beat men half to death with the butt of his Winchester, his face ruddy with bourbon, but he never killed them. Often the ragtag airmen would be thrown from bulkhead to bulkhead as they rode out one of the captain’s crazy schemes. Albion himself took the brunt of Sam’s drunken wrath more than once, by sharp word or heavy fists. Yet, Albion never shook the feeling each time Captain Sam set a looted freighter crew loose, errant and vengeful, of the man making up for some past sin.
The breaking point came somewhere over the Australian outback. Captain Sam was mum over all his black moods, yet the one gripping him one dry, baked run from Melbourne to a small outpost in aborigine territory left him tight-lipped and twitchy, prone to snapping at loud, sudden noises. The hold held nothing particularly gruesome, just a perfectly legal engine for heating and cleaning water, some medical supplies, and boxes of colorful trinkets for trade with the natives.
Albion was seventeen, had his air legs, and was given charge of securing the hold. Six years of Auntie’s hale food and plying the saucy skies had stretched him out, packed on some hard cords of muscle, and browned his skin. Yet, if a person could see a photogram of Albion at eleven and Albion at fourteen, they would recognize the look of hunted insecurity at once. Sam could take the boy out of the Walled City, but the Walled City had tunneled a rat’s nest inside the boy. He was still expecting the Syndicate men to come find him with their cleavers and melon knives.
Even in the darkness of The ’Berry’s hold, the outback heat swept over him in waves. Delicate goods were usually packed in sawdust or barrels of water, leaving little need to insulate the hold itself. The engines churned gallons of steam into nourishing moisture, but Cid had imposed water rationing to insure the ’Berry would not run dry somewhere in the “uncivilized backwater of the world.” Those two weeks were a dry hell of no cold showers and just enough drink to keep a person alive. Sitting in the shafts of light slanting through slats in the bulkhead, Albion felt a little like a smoked fish.
“I know we’re delivering pickles. The settlers won’t miss a little brine off the top,” Albion desperately reasoned, and began climbing the interminable pile of sundry in search of something to splash on his neck. The pile was lashed down well, he had done it himself, but quite tall and packed together like a puzzle. The barrels of foodstuffs were at the top. When Albion reached them, he used a crowbar to pry open the lid, only to discover little jars of brown sick packed in bone-dry sawdust.
“Aw, Branston pickle!” he cursed. It was actually one of his favorites, but the disappointment was a little much in the oven of a hold.
Albion did not know how close he had come, not until the voices began to ripple through the dappled hold. He could actually see the dust motes quiver a split second after he heard the voices.
“You are not truly going through with this?” Cid’s voice was the first to drift through. The next voice did not surprise Albion. The words, however, did.
“We’re doing this, and I won’t have ye bickering over the right of it, you hear?”
Captain Sam’s words were like ice. It chilled the parched Albion to the bone.
“Think it over, Sam. Don’t pretend for a second you aren’t thinking of the Kyushu Maru every living moment of the day. I see you perched on the deck, looking east as if you could bring them back out of the sun.”
“It was war, Cid. I did what my country needed. I sent those folks into the Lands Beyond. They never reached home, and America stayed out of the Great War.”
“Folks, now?” There was a pause. Cid continued. “You could have put them down on any old Pacific island, told the top brass anything you wanted. They would have believed you, Captain Samuel J. Clemens of the Ninety-First Bald Eagles.”
“Do not call me that, you old limey son of a whore,” Sam hollered. Cid took no notice.
“What you’re about to do is a great deal worse, do you understand? Those people had a chance. They might have been able to fly through the ball lightning, evaded the
giant cormorants, blimey, even threaded the coral pillars and whatever else those god-forsaken lands hold. But this time, you, Samuel J. Clemens, are about to knowingly commit genocide! You are going to kill people, Sam!”
“I did what I did because they ain’t people! My crew are people! They never was people!”
Sam’s voice cracked, something it had never, ever done. It was such a shock, Albion’s feet slipped from their perch atop a crate packed full of potatoes. He had been listening intently, leaning forward, and now he tumbled over the edge and onto the boxes of glass trinkets, breaking open the top of one with an attractive clatter.
“You stay off of there, Albion!” Sam’s reprimand didn’t nearly reach Albion in time. As the youth struggled to get up, he kicked over one of the boxes of trinkets. The necklaces and bracelets rattled prettily enough, but when toppled, it was hard to miss both Uncle Cid and Captain Sam jumping agilely out of the way, as if the hard little pebbles were bits of flaming lava.
“Cover yer face! For God’s sake, cover yer face!” Sam’s voice cut through the patter of rolling marbles.
Albion did as he was told, automatically, slowly. His gaze was fixed on the thing hidden underneath the baubles, packed in sweet bundles of dry flowers to mask the scent. It had been done meticulously, but nothing could hide those mottled fingers, sticking up out of the rainbow of glass as if reaching for a body to pull into the grave.
There was a body inside the crate of toys.
Cid had explained it in a way a five-year-old could understand, but Albion had long ago read the treatise in Sam’s jumble of books on the Indians of the American Northeast, who had perished from a European gift of blankets riddled with smallpox. It seemed to Albion his Captain Samuel was just the type of man who was not afraid of using a proven military strategy. Very Sun Tsu.
