Casca 18: The Cursed
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Authors: Barry Sadler
This is a book of fiction. All the names, characters and events portrayed in this book are Fictional and any resemblance to real people and incidents are purely coincidental.
CASCA: #18 The Cursed
Casca
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Copyright © 1987 by Barry Sadler
Cover: Greg Brantley
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Table of Contents
Hundreds of Chinese were falling into the streets. Every fifth bullet was hollow nosed, and expanded on impact to tear off an arm or a leg, or to blow a hole through a man's gut that would accommodate a football.
The upward tilt of the guns sent great chunks of bleeding meat and tripe flying skyward. The streets were spattered with a rain of blood and meat and guts and spent lead.
Countless, perhaps more than a thousand, Chinese were dead, and another thousand or so were dying in moaning agony all around the legation bastion.
The old Hakka peasant, Deng Ziyang, brought his two wheeled cart to a halt against a mud wall beside the dusty road. He looked around cautiously, then spoke softly to the load of cut grass and bullock manure that he was hauling.
"
Honorable barbarian, Cas Ca Sho, we have arrived at Shou Chang. Please to get out of cart quickly and invisibly, as my head will be forfeit if you are seen."
The ill smelling load moved slightly, and a hand and a face appeared amongst the grass and cow dung. The face looked unhappily back down the long dirt road that had jolted him the thirty miles from the river port of
Tsungkow. It was there he had met the old man and contracted with him for the ride to Shou Chang.
He had introduced himself as Casca, but the Chinese made two words of it, and, taking it for his surname, demanded another. Casca had recalled his first visit to China in the second century and had supplied "
Sho" long life.
"Can I enter this building in safety,
honorable one?" the passenger asked the old man.
"Yes, please," the Chinese replied. "Please hurry to enter humble store of my eldest daughter and worthless son in law. It is three more days yet to market day, and for that time this little village will be very quiet."
From where he crouched, under the load of manure, Casca appraised the small village as he waited for an approaching leper to pass the cart.
The daughter's store was one of the first buildings in the town, a small hut of mud brick with a thatch roof. A broken sign hanging from the wall proclaimed its wares, which seemed to consist only of rice and rice flour. Beyond it Casca could see the huge, wooden gates hanging open from the stone wall that surrounded
Shou Chang. Several beggars, blind and lame, sat in the road, leaning against the gates, their hands stretched out toward the non-existent traffic on this nonmarket day. A small boy and two smaller girls came behind the leper, the boy carrying two large buckets of water on a wooden yoke around his neck, the girls each with a pitcher of water on their heads.
"Now?" he whispered as the last girl passed.
"Now," hissed the Chinese, and Casca slid from the cart and moved quickly to the doorway opening in the mud wall. He didn't stop to glance down into the village, but kept moving until he was in a dark corner of the store farthest from the door.
"
Ju Songzhen," the old man called from behind him, and in answer a Chinese woman appeared from the back of the store. "Make this honorable barbarian welcome in your unworthy house. He comes on important business, but none must know of his being here."
The woman answered in a dialect that Casca could not understand, but he guessed her protest easily enough. Visitors were rare in any Chinese village, and, thus, were a matter of interest for everybody, and especially for the village headman and his assistants. A barbarian visitor was an object of deep suspicion, and the concealment of such a person could easily result in a family's ruin.
Casca seated himself on a low wooden stool, the only furniture in the store other than a crude wooden counter surrounded by a number of partially empty sacks. His reluctant hostess and her father argued, the woman screeching shrilly in the local dialect, the man answering her in Cantonese for Casca's benefit. It quickly became clear that all of the woman's protestations were being met by the old man's obstinate reference to his daughter's poverty; the worthlessness of her husband; and the golden opportunity that Tai Tsu Yeh, the benevolent spirit of the mountains, had provided in the shape of this barbarian who had paid so generously for his ride from Tsungkow, and who would pay her even more generously for just a few nights' accommodation, and a few small meals.
And, the old woman repeatedly stressed, her silence.
Casca also heard repeated reference to the Hakka code of hospitality and the merit to be acquired in the eyes of the gods through taking care of strangers in their need.
In considerable relief, Casca realized that the old man was winning the argument, and eventually the woman turned to him.
To his surprise, now that she had accepted the situation, she spoke civilly, even pleasantly, and in Cantonese. "Welcome to our insignificant abode, honorable barbarian. The chief of this humble family is absent at present. He is about his urgent breadwinning activities, but I shall send for him and he will make you decently welcome."
She reverted to the high pitched dialect shriek, shouting toward the rear of the store where Casca could see two small heads almost hidden behind a sack curtain. In response two small children came scurrying and ran across the store and into the street. The woman moved to the back of the store and busied herself by the small fire with a kettle and a teapot, which she brought quickly to the two men, together with cups and a small plate of rice cakes.
"Ju Liqun will be here presently," the old man "said, "just as soon as his long suffering children can drag him away from his disgraceful debauchery." He lapsed into silence and sipped at his tea.
From where he sat, Casca could see a slice of the village street through the open doorway. The street curved and twisted its way through the town, as did all Chinese streets, no matter what the terrain. Evil spirits like to travel in straight lines. All the buildings seemed to be of bricks made from mud and straw. Barefoot people came and went, their noses running in the bitter mountain cold. Most were carrying heavy loads on the wooden yokes or on their heads, or were pulling the clumsy two wheeled carts like the one on which he had arrived from
Tsungkow.
On the far side of a small village square he could see a
porticoed temple, with more beggars sitting on its lowest steps, while sleek, plump Buddhist priests in saffron robes ambled about its broad stone plaza. Where the crumbling street twisted beyond the temple he glimpsed an old peasant plodding behind a plow pulled by a water buffalo, and another whose plow was pulled by a woman. Along the street there passed an occasional loaded ass or horse, or an ox cart; once, Casca caught a glimpse of a two humped camel.
Casca sipped at his tea and reflected on his long journey from the British compound in Hong Kong that had caused him to be here in the first place. An overnight coastal steamer had carried
him' in comparative luxury north to Swatow. Then a long, dirty train ride had taken him to Chaochow on the Han River. From there he had ridden for two days on a riverboat, almost enjoying the silent motion of the single-masted sampan as they made their way through the dense river traffic of other sampans, rafts, canoes, and the occasional high pooped junk. Casca liked to watch the husband and wife crew rowing with their rhythmic, dancelike steps, outer legs moving back and forth in a sort of stationary ballet, the oars whipping the water like the fins of some great fish.
The boat people, whose craft went back in time beyond the gondoliers of Venice, the boat men of the Volga, or the seagoing Vikings, were outcasts on shore, illiterates who were born to live, work, and die on their boats. Yet they were a capable and proud people in their closed world of peaceful industry.
As Casca dwelled on these strong yet gentle people, his own reasons for being here came sharply into focus.
It was the Year of the Boar, 2553 in the Chinese calendar, 1899 in the calendar used by the English, and Sergeant Cassius Longman of Her Majesty's Forty second Foot Regiment was anything but happy with the assignment he had been given by the British consul in Hong Kong.
Casca had come to China en route from the Americas for Calcutta, where he had hopes of finding service in the British East India Company, training native troops in the use of a newly developed breech loading musket.
Ashore in Hong Kong, he had become embroiled in a poker game. He had quickly discerned that he had no chance of winning, due to the phenomenal luck enjoyed by two British China Company sergeants who had arrived on the same boat as Casca. One or the other of them seemed to win almost every pot.
Casca allowed the sergeants to cheat just long enough to be certain of what was happening, then he cut his losses and withdrew to wait in a bar across the street until the game ended and the two sergeants set out for their barracks.
When they saw Casca lurching drunkenly toward them in a narrow, twisting alley they were surprised, but not unduly concerned. They feigned injured innocence when he accused them of cheating, and outraged annoyance when he demanded recompense of double his losses.
Sublimely confident of their own ability to beat any three or four men they might encounter, even if they were all Casca's size, they told him to hop it.
Then they started to move so fast Casca had little choice about what happened next.
He saw the quick glance exchanged between the two cheats as they realized that this sucker had still more money and that they could get it. They moved slightly apart, to be able to attack Casca from both sides.
Casca made as if to run, and the closer of the two men lunged for him so that he was badly off balance as Casca swung around to grab him with both hands and use his own momentum to ram him hard against the stone wall. The force of their combined weights broke his skull like an eggshell. As Casca let the man fall, he turned. The second sergeant aimed a kick at his groin, but Casca moved back, getting his hand under the sergeant's heel, and lifted until the man crashed heavily to the cobblestones.
Casca was on him in an instant, hammering his head into the stones. A few more moments and the fight was quite over, and Casca had stripped and emptied the pockets of both corpses. Another few minutes and two more bodies were added to the harbor's nightly collection of rubbish.
Casca had good reason to be pleased with his take. In place of the five English pounds that he had lost
he now had more than a hundred, along with a silver handled knife and a crocodile skin wallet.
Inside the wallet he found a British army pay book, together with a letter of posting from the British China Company, which said that the bearer was to report to the Forty second Foot Regiment barracks on the day after his arrival in Hong Kong, where he was to put himself under the orders of
the officers of Her Britannic Majesty, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.
"Quite a title," Casca mused, "and one more to add."
Amongst colonial professionals it was held certain that Victoria would be declared "Empress of China" at the London celebrations to mark the turn of the century.
Dawn found Casca at the barracks, where he had little difficulty in reproducing the dead man's signature and so identified himself as Sergeant Cassius Longman, a name close enough to Casca Longinus for him to feel comfortable with it. The other sergeant's name, Henry
Arnsworth, didn't seem to be made for him.
It turned out that Sergeant Longman was to be a drill instructor. As the British China Company didn't use native troops, his duties were punitive drilling of men charged with minor discipline infractions, and the early morning parades. He quickly picked up the complicated British army drill from the mercenaries under his control, and was soon quite comfortable in his little hut in the sergeants' barracks.
But this state of well-being was not to last very long. And Casca had no choice but to blame it all on one Lieutenant Marshman.
One night the drunken lieutenant had strangled a whore in a back alley cathouse, an offense that just might have eventually resulted in some sort of punishment, possibly even a hanging. But she had been Casca's
favorite, almost his private whore, and he had been fond of her little brother, and of her two tiny children; so, he had appointed himself both judge and executioner.
The end result found Casca unhappily exchanging the drill square for the assignment he had been given by the British consul.
But then, he was even more unhappy about the only alternative he had been offered a formal hanging in the Hong Kong military prison. Her Majesty's government frowned severely upon sergeants who killed lieutenants, no matter how much the officer might deserve killing.