Shike, p.31
Shike, page 31
Horigawa's voice came to her from the carriage window. "I regret the loss of a useful servant, but perhaps this spectacle has given you an inkling of what is in store for you."
Taniko's pain turned to rage. "If I should die today, I will die happy, knowing I no longer have to walk in the same world with you."
Horigawa laughed, inclined his head mockingly and turned away.
With the scouts riding in a loose circle around them, the caravan began to move again. Taniko looked back. The raped woman's body lay partly hidden in the tall grass, her severed head a pale blur beside it. The undulations of the plain were gentle, and Taniko was able to see the body for a long time. Even after she could no longer see it, she continued to tremble.
Why couldn't he let the poor woman live? Wasn't it enough to have raped her? She was no more than a used receptacle, to be destroyed as one might smash an empty wine cup. And to Horigawa, Taniko was no more than an unruly slave who must be made to suffer. She thought of the baby Horigawa had murdered. Shikibu, a girl. But her son, Atsue, was so valued that Sogamori had torn him from her side. Her protest, the protest of a woman, was worthless. She had been powerless to stop Sogamori and Horigawa. Always, to be a woman was to be something less than a man.
And now I, too, shall be destroyed. All I can do is meet death with courage.
"Homage to Amida Buddha."
Now they entered the Mongol camp. It smelled of woodsmoke, horses, and roasting meat. The soldiers sat before their round tents and looked up calmly and somewhat curiously as Horigawa's procession passed. Beyond the rows of felt tents the besieged Chinese city smouldered in the dusk.
"What city is that?" Taniko asked a maid.
"Wuchow."
The camp was quiet. She had seen these barbarians rape and murder a woman, but among themselves they seemed orderly enough. She had often heard the Mongols compared to wild beasts, but the men she saw working, cleaning their equipment, currying horses, and repairing tall wooden siege machines had a busy, purposeful air. They were human, even civilized in their own way. That could only make them more dangerous.
Taniko had been carrying with her a box containing a mirror and paints and powders. She set about restoring her make-up.
The carriages came to a stop in the centre of the camp. Before a large white pavilion on the crest of a small hill, Horigawa got out of his carriage. A group of Mongol officers wearing red and blue satin coats, gold medallions and silver-hilted sabres, approached him. Horigawa held up the same object he had shown the scouts. Now Taniko saw that it was a rectangular gold tablet. The Mongol officers inclined their heads courteously.
An aged Chinese official emerged from the large tent. He and Horigawa conferred, then the official gave orders. A group of servants, closely watched by a warrior, began to unload the valuables from Horigawa's carts.
The old Chinese man came over to Taniko's carriage. "I am Yao Chow, the khan's servant," he said. "You will please come out now." The two maids hesitated.
"Go on," said Taniko. "We're safe in this camp, I think. Unless you annoy them." That thought impelled the big women to scramble from their carriage.
Taniko had carried a carved ivory fan all the way from Heian Kyo. Now she stood poised in the doorway of the carriage, drew the fan from her sleeve and opened it with an imperious snap. Her outer robe was of orange silk with dazzling gold embroidery. She wore her favourite hair ornament, a mother-of-pearl butterfly. Her lips were scarlet, her face white as a snow-covered field.
Eor a moment all motion stopped in the centre of the Mongol camp. Out of the corner of her eye Taniko saw, with satisfaction, several barbarian mouths open in wonder. Perhaps it is only that I look strange to them, she thought, but I know I look beautiful. The maids helped her down the carriage's steep ladder.
Swift as a spider, Horigawa was beside her. "A grand entrance, Taniko-san," he whispered in their own language. "You could have been a grand lady in our land, had you not been so foolish as to betray me. Now, however, you are among those who can teach you to respect and fear a man."
Taniko tossed her head. "It seems they respect me well enough."
"That is because they do not know what you are," he spat. "I intend to tell them. I will tell them you are no high-born lady, but simply a courtesan sent by my lord Sogamori as a gift to the Mongol warriors. They will use you and throw you away like rubbish, Taniko. Your fate will be the same as that Chinese maid's, only it will take much, much longer. At first, perhaps, you will be the plaything of the generals. But even now you are no longer as young and attractive as you once were. They will tire of you and you will be cast off to the lesser officers. Eventually, you will be kicked like a football back and forth among the dirty, greasy men in the ranks. At last you will be worn out and old before your time, diseased, toothless. You will end your days among strangers who cannot speak our language, who neither know you nor care about you, far from home, forgotten. Can there be a more miserable end for a gently reared woman of the Sacred Islands than to live out her life in exile as a slave of filthy barbarians?" Grinning, he reached out a long-fingered hand and stroked her cheek softly. She turned away.
I will not give in to despair, she thought. Not in front of him. Later, perhaps, I will weep for all that I have lost and I will fear for my future. Later I will decide whether now, at last, I ought to kill myself. But now I will show him that he cannot hurt me.
She turned back to him with a faint smile. "You forget, Your Highness, that while I lived with you as your wife, my lover was a man of the same blood as these filthy barbarians. Perhaps I shall be quite happy here."
Horigawa laughed. "Ah, yes, I had almost forgotten your warrior monk. He and the rebel Yukio are at large in this country. Indeed, it was their escape that put an end to the noble Kiyosi and placed you back in my power again. Kiyosi, with whom you publicly dishonoured me before all of Heian Kyo. Dinner for fishes now. Poor Kiyosi." He stopped and eyed her with a gleeful hatred.
She would show no feeling. "If Lord Sogamori heard you speak that way of his son, you yourself would be dinner for dogs."
"But through me, Lord Sogamori will be avenged for the death of his son. I come to the Mongols as a secret envoy from His Excellency, Chia Ssu-tao. As a neutral, I have been asked to tell the Mongols that His Excellency recognizes the futility of resistance. He intends to make it easy for them to defeat the Sung, in return for which he asks high office in the empire of the Great Khan. I have already persuaded Chia Ssu-tao that Yukio, the monk and their men are traitors and outlaws in their own land and a potential danger to him. A Mongol army now besieges Kweilin, the city in the south-west which Yukio and his samurai are defending. Now, to rid himself of these undesirables, and to prove his good faith to the Mongols, Chia Ssu-tao intends to let them take Kweilin. The city cannot hold out without reinforcements. None will be sent. Kweilin will be overrun, and the surviving samurai, in accordance with Mongol practice, will be put to death. So your beloved Zinja, my dear, will die. Think of that while the Mongols are using you for their pleasure."
Taniko raised her head, her long fingernails poised to rake his face. But she held herself back.
"Please strike at me." Horigawa smiled. "It would give me such pleasure to knock you into the dirt before these barbarians who imagine you to be such a great lady."
The wrinkled Chinese who served the Mongols called out, "Your Highness. Our lord the khan is prepared to see you now."
Horigawa nodded. "Goodbye, Taniko. I shall never look upon you again, but I shall always revel in the thought of your utter degradation."
As Horigawa accompanied the Chinese official into the presence of the Mongol overlord, another Chinese ushered Taniko to a smaller tent, where, with the rest of Horigawa's retinue, she awaited her fate.
Chapter Eight
The day after tuman-bashi Torluk's mission to Kweilin, the drums in the Mongol camp began to beat in the late afternoon. The Chinese prisoners were herded out of their pen and set to pulling the siege machines to the edges of the moat. Dismounted, the Mongol troops marched in rows to the attack. The three white horsetails of their battle standard moved forward. Yukio ordered all available men in the city to the walls. His drummers struck up a rhythm to inspire the defenders.
Shortly before sunset the Mongols' portable bridges crashed down across the west side of the moat. The hua pao at the base of the Mongols' wooden wall boomed in unison. Iron balls smashed into the ramparts of Kweilin. Catapults flung explosive balls and huge stones into the streets of the city.
Kweilin's hua pao replied, blowing holes in the Mongols' wooden wall. The samurai dropped pots of burning oil on the enemy bridges and set them afire before more than a handful of men could cross the moat.
The Mongols forced their Chinese prisoners to lead the attack as human shields. The prisoners were slaughtered by volleys of arrows from the walls fired by men who pretended not to know whom they were killing.
All that night the Mongols kept coming. Using horses, siege machines, cartloads of earth and human bodies to bridge the moat, they fought to get at Kweilin's walls. They seemed determined to press the attack unceasingly until they took the city. Such a lust for victory, Jebu's Zinja training had taught him, often led to failure.
But he was awed by their sheer energy. Growing up on Kyushu, he had been through many of the great storms the Chinese called tai-phun. The Mongols attacked like a tai-phun, threatening to destroy all in its path. Even as he fought them off with arrows, with naginata and with sword, Jebu recognized in himself a contrary pride that these demons in human form were his people.
At last, at dawn, the assault waves stopped. The few troops remaining on the strip of ground just below the walls scrambled back across the moat, chased by samurai and Chinese arrows. The hua pao stopped spitting fire. The Mongol catapults kept hurling stones and fire bombs over, but less frequently. The many fires throughout the city were under control.
There was no sunrise. Thick grey clouds rolled in from the south and, to Yukio's satisfaction, it began to rain heavily. Rain would protect the city from fire and greatly hamper the besiegers.
Jebu and Yukio sat by the parapet and wiped blood from their swords to keep them from becoming pitted. "We lose so many each time we fight the Mongols that soon there will be none of us left," Yukio said wearily. "What a poor leader I am, having brought these men this far, for them all to die in a strange land."
Governor Liu came down from his ivory chair of state and gripped Yukio and Jebu by the arms. "You should be sleeping, not wasting your time talking to this old man."
Jebu smiled into the governor's red-rimmed eyes. "I doubt that His Excellency has slept this night."
Yukio reported that two hundred Chinese troops and over a hundred samurai were dead or badly wounded. But the two white dragons were still flying over Kweilin.
The governor said, "My scouts say the Mongol tarkhan, Arghun Baghadur, is on his way with reinforcements of two more tumans, twenty thousand men, which his master, the Great Khan Mangu, has assigned to him. With a general like Arghun leading them and outnumbering us so greatly, the Mongols will surely take Kweilin. We are entering the season of heavy rains, and that may slow them down, but the end is still inevitable."
"We have been promised that if we need reinforcements they could be sent here by way of the Kwei Kiang from Canton," Yukio said.
"It is time to send for them," said Liu. He beckoned to his son, an officer of high rank among the Chinese troops. The younger Liu's armour was nicked and battered. He stepped away from the wall of the governor's audience room and knelt at his feet.
"You will go to Canton, my son. You will sail tonight from the river gate."
Eive of the nomads, men too badly wounded to fight to the death, had been taken prisoner, and Jebu managed to convince the samurai that these men would be more useful to them alive than dead. Each day he spent some time visiting the prisoners in the stone building near the governor's palace, doctoring their wounds and conversing with them.
At first they talked in Chinese, which most Mongols knew because northern China had been part of their territory for almost a generation. It was hard for Jebu to understand their dialect, almost a different language from the southern Chinese he was used to. Among them selves the nomad warriors spoke Mongolian, and Jebu learned some of the words and used them when he talked to them. In time their conversation was more and more in Mongolian.
The Mongols distrusted Jebu. Aside from the suspicion of prisoners of war towards any captor, they recognized, as Torluk had, his Mongol features. They assumed he was a traitor, captured in an earlier battle, who had agreed to serve the Chinese in order to save his life. They guessed he had been sent to persuade them to do the same, and they offered to kill him if he would only come close enough.
To the distress of the Chinese guards, Jebu selected the biggest Mongol and fought him barehanded in the courtyard of the prison building. His opponent was the only one of the prisoners who had not been seriously wounded; he had been found unconscious on Kweilin's wall, where a rock, apparently catapulted from his own side, had struck him. It was traditional, bone-cracking, Mongol-style wrestling against Zinja unarmed combat techniques. Jebu threw the big Mongol five times.
Once he had earned their respect and convinced them he wanted no military information, the Mongols grew friendlier. They came to realize that Jebu really did not know Mongolian and therefore could not be a turncoat from their own side.
Eor his part, Jebu soon felt a certain affection for his near countrymen. These five, four of them wounded and sitting in a prison cell, bored and apprehensive, seemed far from being the brutal warriors of legend. Jebu found them simple, illiterate, young, quick to laugh, courageous and kind to one another.
He also discovered that they were fond of drink. He ordered a few jars of rice wine sent into their cell. Within an hour it was gone and they were calling for more. Their appetite for wine was bottomless, and Jebu had to limit their ration to prevent them from being drunk all the time. In their cups they tended to be merry, not belligerent. The language lessons went better with the help of a little wine.
He was starting to understand the Mongol way of life. These young Mongols had grown up enjoying the ease and wealth of the empire Genghis Khan had created, but their parents and grandparents had told them of the older times when not a season went by without at least one death in every family. The world of ice and desert and steppe never relaxes, never gives a second chance. The laws and customs of the Mongols were modelled after the laws of nature, or as the Mongols themselves called it, Eternal Heaven.
Days of inactivity passed behind the wooden wall of the besiegers and the stone walls of Kweilin. Jebu acquired a smattering of Mongolian. Yukio and Governor Liu directed repairs to the city and its fortifications. Everyone watched the river for signs of transport junks bringing a relief expedition.
Twelve days after the unsuccessful assault on Kweilin, word came from Governor Liu's scouts that Arghun Baghadur had returned from his visit to Mangu Khan in Szechwan province.
"Do we launch another attack on them to demonstrate how much we are to be feared?" Yukio asked Jebu as they stood on the wall watching the two additional tumans Arghun had brought with him set up camp.
"Suppose I toss you off the wall into their midst. That should frighten them."
Moko, who was on the walls with them, watching the arrival of the Mongol reinforcements, said, "I have been trying to design a catapult that would toss me out of this city and safely across the Kwei Kiang to the opposite bank."
After setting up their yurts, as they called their round felt tents, the new arrivals remounted their horses. They formed up in squares of a hundred mounted men, a whole tuman containing a hundred such squares, ten across and ten deep. The five tumans that made up the army besieging Kweilin formed in a semi-circle wider than the city itself on the southern shore of the two lakes. Eifty thousand cavalrymen faced the city. Beyond them, drawn up in parade formation, were new siege machines and masses of auxiliary troops from the nations the Mongols had conquered.
Jebu felt a chill go through his body. Even for a Zinja-a Zinja hardened by fifteen years of almost continuous combat-the Mongol army was a terrifying sight. He had never seen an army this large. He doubted whether all the samurai in the Sunrise Land, gathered together, would present a spectacle like this. No wonder men were so terrified of the Mongols that some of them surrendered at the first news of their approach.
Yukio, beside him, let out a deep breath. "How foolish I was to think my little band could stand against something like this." He shook his head sadly.
A bannerman rode out before the massed Mongol troops, carrying the three-horsetail battle standard of the army. Now Jebu noticed that each tuman had a standard of its own planted in the ground before the massed squares of cavalry. The banner carrier drove the pointed base of his standard pole into the ground in the centre of the field, just by the joining of the two lakes. How many battles, Jebu wondered, had these six standards seen? Over how many nations had they triumphed?
Eive more horsemen rode into the open centre of the field, one from each tuman. They formed a semi-circle behind the battle standard.
"The tuman-bashis," Yukio said.
The army before the city and the spectators on the walls seemed to hold their breath. A horn blared. Down from the hills beyond Kweilin rode a single horseman on a steppe pony.
He could have his pick of any horse in the conquered territories, Jebu thought. He could ride a huge black stallion or a white charger.
He could have a horse worth a kingdom. But he chooses, when he shows himself to his army and to his enemy, the same sort of pony he has ridden all his life, the sort his ancestors have ridden for thousands of years before him.
The only sound was the clatter of one horse's hooves. The rider's red cloak streamed out behind him, showing his red lacquered armour.
It's strange, thought Jebu. I'm seeing the man who murdered my father, and yet he makes me think of my father. My father must have been a man very like him, and so he restores my father to me.
