Dead Man’s Hand (50 page)

Sister Wen wore a thick coat meant for a long journey. Yun’s heart sank. “You’re leaving?”
Yun could not keep the anger out of her voice. “You would abandon the Heavenly State
in its hour of need?”

Instead of turning her face away in shame, Sister Wen looked at her calmly. “You visited
the capital a year ago. Could you tell
Tienwang
’s palace apart from the Forbidden City in Peking?”

Yun had no answer to that.

“It’s not too late to leave,” Sister Wen said. “You can still escape to the remote
mountains and hide in the bamboo groves, where the Manchus will never find you and
you can leave this world to its own ugliness.”

Instead of answering, Yun took her sword and wrote the character
tien
on the ground, the bar at the top tilted like a ladder to the sky.

Sister Wen stared at the character. She was weary. “When the heart no longer believes,
the magic of words is useless.”

And that was the last time Yun saw her.

* * *

“When Tienching fell a few months later, the Manchu slaughter turned the streets into
rivers of blood: men, women, children, the elderly, the wounded, none were spared.

“I and a few others escaped to islands scattered in the East Sea, and made our way
to the Philippines. From there we got on a ship and came to America.”

“So the magic of words failed,” Amos said. He was disappointed. The story had seemed
like a fairytale, one that he wanted to believe in.

“No,” Yun said. “We just picked the wrong words.”

* * *

Yun and her companions had never seen so much empty land.

The wilderness of Idaho was pristine, absolute. In China, every
mu
of land had been worked on and shaped by the plow for generations, but here, there
were no marks but those of God. It was an empty page waiting for old ideas to be thrown
away and new ones to be written.

(Later, she would learn about the Indians who had once been here. Every story was
more complicated than it appeared at first, yet hope sprang eternal.)

Refugees from every land, following every creed, had come with the dream of striking
gold. In this place with no rules, they became violent, soulful, self-reliant. They
fought with the land, with the Indians, with each other, and yet they also discarded
old animosities, welcomed strangers, gave the newcomers aid and succor when they needed
them.

Yun and the other Taiping survivors worked hard to carve a fresh life in their new
home, and in the evenings, she studied the language of this new land, as hardy as
her mountains, as pungent as her forests, as varied as her population, as rich as
her mines.

Along with gold, she discovered words, bountiful and beauteous words that sang of
a love of freedom that beat in sympathy with her rebellious heart. Nowhere else were
men so ready to embrace new words—
pogonip
,
pai gow
,
cowboy
—immigrating from other tongues, arising from inventive minds, becoming respectable
despite origins in error. Like fresh trails crossing virgin territory, new words allowed
thoughts to travel to glimpse new vistas.

Yun read and savored and built up a treasure trove of words that struck her. She saw
that no people believed more in equality, in the power of ideas, in the right to take
up arms against tyranny, than the people of America.

And she saw where the Taiping had erred.

* * *

With a stick, she began to write on the ground.

“There are countless ways to write the last character in the name of the Taiping,
kuo
, which means ‘state.’
Tienwang
could have chosen to write it like this—

“—composed of the character
min
—that means ‘the people’—inside the four borders. But instead he chose to write it
like this—

“—composed of the character
wang
—that means ‘the king’—inside the four borders.”

“So he created the Heavenly Kingdom instead of the Heavenly Republic,” Amos said.
It was an old story, and a familiar one. Those who sought freedom were tempted by
power instead, and became indistinguishable from those they sought to overthrow.

“For years, decades now, we’ve mined gold and sent it back into China, where the money
has kept the fire of rebellion alive. Right now, there’s a young man back there, Sun
Yat-sen, the greatest magician with words I’ve ever seen. His pamphlets have given
the people faith again, and struck terror into the heart of the Emperor. The gold
in those boxes isn’t for me, but for him and his revolution.”

“What if he fails? What if this rebellion, like yours, also turns dark? You said that
the magic of words is fragile, subject to the corrupt hearts of mortal men. What good
is a lovely name if you can’t live up to it?”

“Then we’ll just try again, and if that fails, yet another time. It’s not so easy
to shake off heavy chains. The Taiping Rebellion failed the same year that a war ended
slavery here. Yet this country still feels the shadow of those shackles. China may
not be free from the phantom of the Manchu yoke for a hundred years. But my time here
has shown me what is possible when men believe.”

“How can you say that?” Amos wanted to grab her and shake her. “Have you not seen
how Congress has decided that you’re to be deported, like rats for Pike and his men
to slaughter?”

Yun looked him straight in the eye. “And yet here you are, defending a crazy Chinawoman
against the likes of them.”

“I am just one man,” Amos said.

“Everything starts with one person, a man or a woman.” She paused, chose her words
carefully, and went on. “You doubt because you see only the ugly words, the words
of hypocrisy and fear. Dark laws grow out of confused hearts that have lost faith,
and I hope one day to see Congress change its mind. But the words I love I found not
in the smoky halls of power in great cities, but in the wilderness out here, among
lonesome rebels, refugees, men with nothing to their names but hope.”

Amos closed his eyes. She seemed to say aloud what he had only thought.
The Western frontier, like a kite high in the sky, is where the ideals of the Republic
take flight and soar, with the stagnant East pulled behind it like a reluctant boy.

She caressed the papers in her lap lovingly. “Words do matter. Their magic comes from
one mind reaching another across miles and years, and what one assumes the other shall
also assume, what one believes the other shall also believe. Words take root and grow
in the hearts of men, and from there faith springs eternal.”

He looked at the pages, at the woman, and at the land bathed in starlight around him.
And he seemed to see the land itself as a laid-open book, a record of the long and
winding struggle toward freedom by one people—out of many, one.

Yes, it was true. Words did matter. A piece of paper from a court, a little novel,
a proclamation, a few amendments to an old parchment—had these not torn a Republic
apart and then sewn it back together?

* * *

AMOS

For a while, there were occasional shots from the woods across the stream, as though
Pike’s men were trying to keep them awake. But even that had stopped an hour ago.

The eastern sky was growing brighter.

“I think they’re gone,” Amos said.

Yun let out a deep breath and almost fell over. Amos was quick with his arm and held
her up.

“It’s been a long night,” Yun said. She sounded exhausted. “Well, if you think we’re
safe, maybe you can patch me up.” She winced as she tried to move her left arm.

“I’m no doctor.”

“Not that way,” Yun said. She picked up another sheet of paper from her bundle, turned
it over so that the blank side faced up, and handed it to him along with a pencil
she found in the folds of her dress. “Write down how you want me to feel.”

Amos stared at the paper, surprised and confused. “I don’t know how. Why can’t you
just do the magic yourself?”

“It doesn’t work that way. The magic of words comes from two people: one writes, one
reads. I can’t just write whatever I want and make it come true—that’s just wishful
thinking. I can pull out the magic of words others print in books, and it works just
as well if they write it by hand. But the writer has to believe what he writes, which
is why I had to wait till now with you.”

Amos took the pencil and wrote:

“Sorry.” He paused. “I always write it as one word though it’s supposed to be two.
Let me try again.”

“Write it the way you like,” Yun said. “Dictionaries and schoolmarms care only for
binding words down with rules, fitting them into neat little grids where they can’t
move. If they had their way, there’d be no new words and no new magic. Who knows,
maybe your shorter word will heal me quicker.”

Amos laughed. And he wrote some more.

“Now that’s an American word, a real word of power.”

She took the paper from him, chewed it, and swallowed. Amos was pleased to see she
had that contented, happy look again. A healthy glow returned to her face, and when
she moved her arm again, there was no wince.

“See if you’re recovered enough to get on Mustard. When the sun’s up, we can get out
of here.”

* * *

While Yun shortened the stirrups and talked to Mustard to get acquainted, Amos sat
by the fallen trees and flipped through the other papers in Yun’s bundle.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him…

Limpsy
, he thought.
Yun is right. This is a land of new words and new ideas, always renewed by the endless
wilderness in which man can find solitude and faith in himself—

A loud shot shattered the peaceful air like thunder. Mustard whinnied and reared up
on her hind legs. Yun barely hung on.

Amos looked down and saw the wound in his stomach, from which blood flowed freely,
then the pain doubled him over and he dropped his rifle.

Pike and his men stood in a semi-circle about twenty feet away.

“You didn’t think we’d try crossing the stream upriver and come up behind you?” he
sneered.

“You’re right,” Amos said. He felt waves of dizziness and struggled to stay sitting
up. “You got us.”

“Now you can die with your Chinawoman.”

From the ground, Amos looked over at Yun, still sitting on Mustard. She made no attempt
to get away. Indeed, he could tell that she was thinking of coming over to his aid,
even if they would both die.

He locked eyes with her, and then quickly glanced over at the boxes of gold, making
sure she remembered.

He dragged his left arm listlessly on the ground, through the leaves, the bits of
bark, and the dark soil, as though he was in too much pain to control himself. As
Yun stared at him, her eyes full of fire, he traced out the strokes of the character
tien
: one, two, three, and then the last stroke, a defiant diagonal, like a ladder to
the sky, like lifting off the weight from a limpsy heart.

Her eyes grew wet. But she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

What I assume you shall assume
.

“Now, run!” Amos shouted.

Yun dug her heels into Mustard’s sides, and the mare leaped down from the hill, galloping
away toward the woods.

Pike’s men scrambled to aim their guns at her fleeing figure. No one was paying any
attention to the dying old man.

With every bit of his remaining strength, Amos snatched up his rifle.

Yun had wrapped three cartridges in the words of the
Star Spangled Banner
:
red glare
,
bombs
, and
rocket
.

He had shot two, and now the last one was levered into place.

He pulled the trigger, and Pike and his gang—along with the smiling Amos—disappeared
in a great ball of fire.