and if you don’t think that shirt, bloody breeches, and great clog sandals can look elegant, you’re mistaken. The long hungry face was smiling a little, as a cat might smile if it could. “No. You were going to Nanking. We can take you there … or farther.” And for the first time since I’d met her, she dropped her eyes.
“Hey!” cries Yei, who I learned was the gang idiot, and had just reached a conclusion the others had known long ago. “She wants him to——!” Obviously they’d all gone to the same elocution class. “That’s why she wants to keep him with us! To——!”
Her response might have been to blush and say, “Really, Yei!” – and perhaps, by Chinese bandit standards, it was. For she was on her feet like a panther, reached him in two great strides, plucked him up wriggling by the neck, and laid into him with a bamboo. He yelled and struggled while she lambasted him mercilessly at arm’s length until the stick broke, when she swung him aloft in both hands, dashed him down, and trampled on him.
He came to after about ten minutes, by which time I had lost any inclination to argue with the lady. “Nanking let it be,” says I. “As it happens, I have business with the Loyal Prince Lee.” That ought to impress even bandits. “You know the Taipings?”
“The Coolie Kings?” She shrugged. “We have marched with them against the Imps, now and then. What is your business with the Chung Wang?”
“Talk,” says I. “But first I shall ask him for two hundred taels in silver.”
We spent the night where we were, since the crack I’d taken on the head had left me feeling fairly seedy. Next morning I had nothing worse than a bad headache, and we set off north-west through the wooded flats and flood-lands that lie between the great river and the Tai Hu lake to the south. Nanking was about fifty miles ahead, but in the state of the country I reckoned it would take us a good four days, and wary travelling at that.
For we were marching into a battle-field – or rather, a killing-ground that stretched a hundred miles, where the remnants of the Imperial armies were fleeing before the Taipings, with both sides savaging the country as they went. I’ve seen slaughter and ruin in my time – Gettysburg, and Rio villages where the Mimbreno had passed through, the Ganges valley in the Mutiny time, and the pirate-pillaged coast of Sarawak – but those were single battle-grounds, or a few devastated villages at most. This was a whole country turned into a charnel-house: village after burned village, smoke on every horizon, corpses, many of them hideously mutilated, on every wrecked street and in every paddy and copse – I remember one small town, burning like a beacon, and a pile of bodies of every age and sex outside its shattered gate – that pile was eight feet high and as long as a cricket pitch; they had been herded together, doused with oil, and burned.
“Imps,” says Szu-Zhan, and I daresay she was right, for they were worse than the rebels. We saw scattered bands of them every hour, and had to lie up as they passed: mobs of Bannermen, in their half-armour and quilted jacks, Tiger soldiers like grotesque harlequins in their close-fitting suits of diagonal black and yellow, Tartar cavalry in fur-edged conical hats and gaudy coats, dragging wailing women behind their ponies. In one place we saw them driving a crowd of peasants – there must have been a couple of hundred – into an open field, and then they just charged among them, and butchered them with their swords and lances. And everywhere the dead, and the death-smell mingling with the acrid smoke of burning homes.
I don’t describe this to harrow you, but to give some notion of what China was like in that summer of ’60. And this was one small corner, you understand, after one battle, in a vast empire where rebellion had flamed for ten long years. No one can ever count the dead, or tally the destruction, or imagine the enormity of its blood-stained horror. This was the Taiping – the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
After the first day, though, I barely noticed it, any more than you notice fallen leaves in autumn. For one thing, my companions were indifferent to it – they’d lived in it for years. And I had my own skin to think about, which means after a little time that you feel a curious elation; you are alive, and walking free, in the Valley of the Shadow; your luck’s holding. And it’s easy to turn your thoughts to higher things, like journey’s end, and your continued survival, and the next meal, and the slim towering figure ahead, with those muscular buttocks and long legs straining the tight breeches.
The devil of it was, while we were sleeping out there was no privacy, with those six villains never more than a few yards away, and dossing down beside us at night. She was watching me, though, with that knowing smile getting less lazy, and her mouth tightening with growing impatience as the hours and miles passed. I was getting a mite feverish myself; perhaps it was the barbarous conditions, and the frustration of being so near, but I wanted that strapping body as I wanted salvation; once, when we lay up in a wood while a long convoy of Imp stragglers went by, we found ourselves lying flank to flank in long grass, with the others behind the bushes, and I began to play with her until she turned on me, her mouth shaking and searching for mine. We pawed and grappled, grunting like beasts, and I dare say would have done the trick if the clown Yei hadn’t come and trodden on us.
By the second afternoon we had struck a patch of country which the war seemed to have passed by; peasants were hard at it standing in the fields, and not far ahead there was a fortified hill-summit, betokening a safe village; we had picked up some baggage and side-arms on our journey, and even a cart to push them in, at which the bandits took complaining turns, and Szu-Zhan said we should stay that night at an inn, because camping out you never knew when you might be molested by prowlers. It’s a great thing, property-owning.
We were such an evil-looking gang – especially with myself, a big-nosed, fair-skinned barbarian, which is the height of ugliness to the Chinese – that I doubted if they’d let us through the gate, but there was a little temple just outside the wall, with a vulture-like priest ringing a hand-bell and demanding alms, and once Szu-Zhan had given him a handful of cash he croaked to the gate-keeper to admit us. It was a decent village, for China; the piled filth was below window-level, and the Inn of Mutual Prosperity had its own tea-shop and eating-house – quite the Savoy or Brown’s, if you like, a shilling a night, bring your own grub and bedding.
Indeed, I’ve fared worse at English posting-houses in my schooldays than I have in some rural Chink hotels. This one was walled all round, with a big archway into its central court, and we hadn’t stopped the cart before a fat little host was out with the inevitable tea-pot and cups. Szu-Zhan demanded two rooms – one on the side-wall for the six lads, and another de luxe apartment at the top of the yard, away from the street – those are the better, larger rooms, and cost three hundred cash, or eighteenpence. They’re big and airy – since the door don’t fit and the paper in the windows lets in fine draughts, but they’re dry and warm, with a big kong, or brick platform bed, taking up half the room. Under the bed there’s a flue, for dry grass or dung fuel, so you sleep most comfortably on top of a stove, with the smoke going up a vent in the wall – or rather, not going up, since the chimney’s blocked, and you go to bed in dense fog. Privacy is ensured by closing the door and getting mine host to jam your cart up against it.9
There wasn’t a “best” room available, until Szu-Zhan shrugged back the cloak she’d picked up, and rested her hand on her cleaver-hilt, at which mine host blenched and wondered if the Paddy-field Suite wasn’t vacant after all; he signified this by grovelling at our feet, beating his head on the ground in the kow-tow (“knocking head”, they call it), pleading with us to wait just a moment, and then scrambling up, grabbing a servant, and getting him to deputise as kow-tow-er while the host scurried off to eject a party who had just booked in. He fairly harried them out, screaming – and they went, too, dumb and docile – while the servant continued to bash his brains out before us, and then we were ushered in, another tea-pot was presented with fawning servility, and we were assured that dinner could be served in the apartment,
