Casca 18: The Cursed (14 page)

Five days passed, and the city remained at a standstill, the normally placid Chinese peasants shocked out of their wits at their own monstrousness.

After the sack of the British legation the mob had turned its fury on the smaller and less protected legations of all the other foreign powers. And on their churches, missions, monasteries, nunneries, schools, hospitals, orphanages.

By the third day there was not a live European to be found in the entire city. Nor were there many who had died easily.

The troops defending the legations had been smothered by endless numbers of Chinese who poured relentlessly over their lightly defended walls, ignoring the bullets and bayonets that killed them in their thousands till they came to grips with the foreign devils. The European and American soldiers and diplomats and businessmen and their families had been cut to pieces often one piece at a time with kitchen knives; disemboweled, castrated, mutilated, their women raped, their children butchered.

Casca had stayed in his palace throughout the massacre, keeping his troops within the palace grounds, exercising and training them for the inevitable reprisals that he realized must come soon.

The British navy, Casca well knew, had more than three hundred ships of the line, and Britain launched more than a thousand new merchant ships each year. And he also knew too well that the British would sail every one of those ships up the Han River to Tsungkow if necessary to avenge the legation and to reinstate Victoria's rule.

The news that came to his palace from around the country was almost all bad.

The uprising had been almost entirely abortive, ill conceived, not at all planned, and badly led. The faith of the Boxers in their newfound philosophy compounded from the Bible, Paine, Marx, and Queensberry had been profoundly ill placed. And the faith of the peasants in the leadership of these crazy young men had served them very badly.

The uprising had, as expected, erupted throughout the entire country, but
Tsungkow was one of the few places where it had met with any success. In other cities and county seats the foreign legations had been attacked and hundreds of Europeans and Americans had been massacred. But tens of thousands of Chinese had died in the event, and within a few days the rebellion had faltered to a standstill, the peasants sated with blood and disgusted with themselves, their Boxer leaders fighting amongst themselves, or simply having no idea what to do once they were in command of a village or town.

Worst of all, none of the expected support had materialized. The Freemasons had turned their
backs on the rebels. Businessmen like Mr. Song had not even provided the expected money and arms. Sun Yat Sen and his Kuomintang Democrats had quite ignored the events. And the emperor and almost all of the imperial nobles had sided with the British and the other foreign devils.

In
Chaochow, Baron Ying had ruthlessly put down the rebellion at first light on the first day of the new year, and, Sen Yung's messengers warned, was even now moving against Tsungkow without waiting for the British to make it up the river from Swatow.

Casca sat at ease on the raised inner wall of his palace with Liang
Yongming massaging his feet while he watched Huang Chu exercising troops for the coming battle.

Defeat was virtually certain, but Casca intended to make the best possible fight of it. The only hope of minimizing the reprisals was to reduce the number of able bodied troops who could exact them.

A much chastened David Sen Yung sat beside Casca. Despite his best efforts, he had failed to die in the attack on the legation and had been forced to swallow the bitter fruit of his dreams. Yet still he dreamed.

At every piece of good news of the rebellion he waxed enthusiastic once more. In Shanghai, Sian,
Chengtu, and a number of other cities the Boxers had succeeded to some degree. In Kwangtung, Szechwan, and even in the capital, Peking, many of the top Manchu officials had been assassinated. And in Nanking the Boxers had declared a provisional government independent of the Manchu emperor. The local Boxer leader declared that henceforth Chinese would create their own modern civilization, promote a peaceful life, and ensure that China would never again be a subdued nation.

"Fine sentiments," Casca grunted when Sen
Yung read a copy of the proclamation. "There's a familiar ring to them."

But from other cities there came very bad news. Yangchow, once one of China's oldest and most important cities, had almost been completely destroyed in the British counterattack with the loss of tens of thousands of lives. A special tragedy, as the city had only recently been rebuilt, having been destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion just thirty five years earlier.

Casca and Huang had put the five days to good use, and every soldier in every one of the city's numerous garrisons was on duty, living within the garrison with arms and armor close to hand. The smaller garrisons had forces of five to six thousand men under arms; some of the larger ones had twenty to twenty five thousand. The men of all the garrisons had been divided into watches, and one third of them were standing by, ready for action at all hours. The remainder could be called upon within minutes.

Watchmen were on duty day and night in all the city's watchtowers, striking gongs every hour from sunrise to sunrise as water clocks measured out the time.

Trenches and holes for marksmen had been dug all around the outer perimeter of the city and in every open space between the walls. Atop the walls, coal fires were set, ready to be lit, and nearby were vessels full of water, fire pots full of oil, and ingots of lead ready to be heated and poured upon attackers.

Just outside the outer city wall Casca had set up a number of
ballistas, giant slings that could hurl missiles of around ten pounds for distances of a quarter of a mile.

But when it came, the attack held no element of surprise.

Baron Ying rode toward the city at the head of an army of forty thousand men. In the late afternoon he encamped at a distance of a mile and sent ahead messengers demanding the surrender of the city and offering to spare Casca's life if he surrendered without a fight and gave up David Sen-Yung and all the Boxer ringleaders, the Pao, the colonel of the city, and the leading elders.

Casca replied that none of these men was responsible for the sacking of the legations, and that he alone bore responsibility. He called upon Ying to withdraw his troops, warning him that if he failed to so do, he would attack his camp at dawn.

There was no reply from the baron, and on the stroke of midnight Casca unleashed upon his camp a massive barrage of rockets fired from the palace, accompanied by several thousand agny astras, the fire darts being launched upon Ying's tents by troops who had crept to within a hundred or so yards under cover of darkness.

Hundreds of tents caught fire, and their occupants were milling around in confusion when Casca's archers opened fire on them and his swordsmen waded into them.

Ying's men had no chance. Few of them were within reach of their arms, the cavalry's horses had been driven off, and most of them had no choice but to flee.

Ying appeared, raging, and tried desperately to rally his men, but to little effect. By the time the sun started to light the sky the bodies of thousands of his warriors littered the field, and thousands more were in full flight.

Full dawn revealed that Casca had won, and at almost no cost to his own forces.

From the palace walls Casca and Huang saw the result, but did not bother to congratulate each other. They knew well that the real danger did not come from Ying's primitively armed Chinese troops.

The watchmen in the towers had barely started to sound the alarm when cannonballs started to fall upon the city and the palace.

Six British ships lay in the river, broadside on to the city, their banks of cannon belching fire and round shot. The British commodore had sailed his ships upstream to within a few miles
of the city, then waited for darkness and launched longboats, the rowing crews towing the ships into place in the dark.

Casca had expected some such tactic, but the tables were nonetheless nicely turned on him. The
cannonfire demolished whole buildings, including some of the garrisons, throwing the townspeople and the soldiers into panic. The British sailors knew exactly what they were doing, placing their shots about the city where they had the most telling effect.

Casca had a mental image of the British officers on their gun decks, working with detailed maps of the city that they had been preparing for years against just such an occasion.

Then the guns started firing chain and grape shot into the garrisons and the surrounding streets, cutting the surprised Chinese soldiers and the terrified citizenry to pieces, turning panic into rout.

Marines poured ashore from the ships and advanced in lines, firing as they marched, pausing to reload while the next rank leapfrogged, and then the next,
maintaining a continuous fusillade that killed all before it.

Huang Chu managed to get some of his troops into order and his captains made stands here and there, but the archers were no match for the British rifles. The swordsmen could get nowhere near them, and the Chinese were forced to retreat continually.

And when the British troops came to open spaces like the city squares and the temple grounds or long stretches of straight street, they were able to set up their Maxim guns, and the Chinese were cut to shreds.

Street by street and corner by corner they advanced. Here and there Huang's men made determined stands, but
to little avail.

The rocket crews turned their racks to face the river, and when they adjusted their aim, scored a number of hits on the ships, setting fire to two of them, and igniting one powder magazine so that one whole ship exploded.

But in the narrow, twisting streets the rockets could not be brought to bear on the marines who advanced relentlessly, their rifles clearing street after street, the machine guns adding to the slaughter.

From the palace walls Casca watched. It was worse than he had feared. His archers accounted for only a few of the riflemen, while the advancing
Enfields and machine guns killed soldiers and civilians indiscriminately in enormous numbers.

And the British
cannoneers quickly got the range of the rocket launchers and put them out of action in quick succession.

Then the marines were at the outer city walls, the defenders at last able to take some toll on their numbers. But once the machine guns were set up, the defenders on the walls were quickly wiped out.

Boiling water and lead and exploding clay pots full of burning oil rained down upon the attackers, but most of them stayed out of range and waited for the Maxims to wipe the defenders from the walls.

Chanting sailors came dragging small cannon along the streets to within a hundred yards of the outer walls of the city, and the huge wooden gates disappeared in a fiery mess of splintered wood and bleeding bodies.

The marines rushed through the gap and established a square of riflemen, and then a machine gun crew set up inside the gates and swept hot lead about the space to the second wall.

When the cannon blew away the second set of gates, Casca wearily buckled on his sword belt, picked up his mace, and started dawn from the wall.

As he reached the ground he turned for a last look at his palace. Huang Chu, he knew, would die in the battle or be executed after it. His faithful Pao and the city elders would likewise be executed as an example to those in other cities. David Sen Yung had rushed out into the streets at the first cannonade and had probably thrown away his life.

Casca had said good bye to all his concubines the previous night, and tenderly to Liang
Yongming that morning. He raised one hand to wave farewell to his palace and his reign as Hsia.

"And where might the killer of Christ
be going?" The woman's voice startled him and he turned to see the diminutive nun who had lashed him with her feather duster and with her tongue.

"Where the hell did you come from?" Casca laughed. He was actually pleased to see that the demented old fanatic had survived the slaughter.

Sister Martina laughed, too. "Oh, I know this palace better than you do. Better than even the Pao, or Tian, or any of the team of concubines that you disgrace yourself with.

"This palace was first built in 635 A.D., during the
T'ang dynasty. The T'ang dynasty granted refuge to Nestorian Christians who were being persecuted elsewhere as heretics which they were and are. Around the tenth century they were persecuted again, and again in the sixteenth century, then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and now in the twentieth century.

"But Christianity has survived here, and one day all of China will be Christian as you will surely live to see."

Casca grimaced. "Even your Messiah didn't curse me to live that long."

The nun was unperturbed. "We can afford to be patient.
It is written that all the world must be converted before the Second Coming."

"Oh my God," Casca groaned.

"Don't blaspheme," the little nun snapped, and raised one tiny hand as if threatening a blow.

Casca laughed. "Where's your feather duster?"

"I didn't realize I would need it when I took refuge from the rioting."

"Where did you find refuge?"

"Come, I will show you. Now you need refuge, and the Brotherhood of the Lamb must provide it for you. Loathe you as we do, we cannot afford to lose you."

Casca turned away from her and headed for the sounds of battle in the outer courtyards.
"Good bye, Sister. I don't need refuge, I need death."