The Blue-Eyed Shan (34 page)

“You'll do as I say,” Greenwood told Yang. “You'll go out tomorrow with the boy.”

“And leave others to fight.”

“You've done your fighting. The last thing we need is a general.” They were back in the House of the Dead, and Greenwood, prowling and taut, felt larger every moment. He could not fill his lungs. He inhaled enormous quantities but could not still his soul. With the bandits in the hills he had been shamefully frightened, and now he was resolute and almost exhilarated. It was the comfort of compulsion, the absence of choice.

“I am here only because my men stood by me,” Yang muttered, “and now you ask me to run out. I did not foresee these complications.”

“Stop that,” Greenwood said. “I didn't foresee them either, and it's my territory, not yours. I'll save Pawlu and you save those bones. Jum-aw knows the trail, and owes me a life. If I don't show up later, you tell everybody Greenwood deserves a footnote somewhere, and write to my folks. Tell them I did right.”

“I think you're a damn fool,” Yang said. “Death wish.”

“Not at all. Plenty to live for. We'll put your colonel to work and clean up this here town.”

“You won't cross?”

“No! We holler from our side of the road, he hollers from his.”

“The telephones in Shanghai,” Yang murmured.

“What?”

“‘Czarist fascist!' ‘Crypto-Communist!'”

“You all right?”

“I have never been older,” Yang said. “I am exhausted, deeply depressed and in no humor to seek the bubble reputation in the cannon's mouth. Furthermore, every time I come to Pawlu you start ordering me around.”

“I see down,” Naung said. He hunkered at his own hearth.

Loi-mae touched his lips. “It is your voice that commands.”

“It is the web of events. No man truly commands. And I must bow to the Sawbwa and clap your Green Wood on the shoulder.”

“He is not my Green Wood.”

“I want to hear his funny stories and see the hair on his chest,” Lola said.

“You be quiet.”

“He is Lola's father. As the Sawbwa says, it would not have displeased the gods had Green Wood paid a visit to his family.”

Loi-mae did not speak.

“I would not have barred the gate to him,” Naung said, “nor reminded you, ever.”

“I would never hurt you,” Loi-mae said.

“Well, it would have done no harm,” Naung said, but his eyes were cold. “You must look into your heart now, and take strength from what you find. He may be killed. He may leave, never to return. I believe he would have left had that aircraft landed.”

Lola crouched, her eyes enormous. “No.”

“What does Green Wood matter?” Loi-mae asked. The question was a lie; she knew that Naung sensed that. “With all Pawlu at the edge of life.”

“He is said to be a fighter, at any rate. How inscrutable is destiny! Without him, no Lola; with him …”

Solemnly Lola hitched the sheath of the northern dagger to her leather waistband.

The Shan gathered in the Common Field. By families they came, by couples. Old ones trudged, bowed by the weight of food and hoarded silver. On the field, neighborhoods sprang up. Loi-mae and Chung made common household, attended by the boy Jum-aw, abashed to be out of the fighting yet with his rifle to hand. In the center, the Sawbwa and Za-kho held court. Goats and bullocks grazed outside the circle. Fires flickered and leapt, faces loomed and faded. Sadness fell upon the Shan like slow rain: for the lives that might be lost, the houses that might be burned, the animals that might stampede, the children who would learn terror. Beneath, there lay a deeper sadness: that the gods had permitted this. Soon there rose the aroma of roasting saing, and that lightened their hearts, but not much.

Thuan-yi turned on his side and urinated quietly. He ran a thumb along the blade of his long knife. The thumb bled. He ate a strip of dried dog, and then a cricket.

In midafternoon Greenwood and Kin-tan set out. A chain of silent, invisible Shan flanked them as they trotted through Red Bullock Pass. Wan had pronounced the road secure, the ridges and East Poppy Field clear. Greenwood, Kin-tan and a shifting, shuttling guard of armed runners made their way to South Slope, where the Shan was thickest, perhaps two hundred paces above the road and the Chinese. Greenwood's excitement was intense—fervor and not jitters; he still felt large, was sweating copiously and hardly noticed the weight of his weapon.

No one hindered their progress. Not even a toktay crossed their path. Greenwood dismounted, tethered his pony to an evergreen, dashed the last hundred paces and flung himself flat on the spongy, resinous earth. He crawled then, Kin-tan behind him, to the Roost. Snaking forward he saw the road and the Chinese camp.

Thuan-yi had contracted, and curled himself about the trunk of his sheep-stagger-bush like the hard-worm about the melon vine. With the sun westering he lay in shadow. He saw Shan, and he saw the albino. This was magic. The albino was with his soldiers below.

There were two albinos!

This one trod within a pace of him. Thuan-yi saw the fair skin, the bony nose, the wrinkled corners of the light eyes, the curly golden hair. He also saw the weapon.

Greenwood cupped his hands and shouted, “Olevskoy! Olevskoy!”

There was motion among the Chinese. Kin-tan adjusted the binoculars.

“Oleveskoy!”

“Who … are … you … and … what … do … you … want?”

“Greenwood! The American!”

“It was the Russian who called, “Kin-tan said. “His officers now seek us with their field glasses.”

“They won't fire,” Greenwood said. He hollered again, “Olevskoy!” and outlined the tactical problem.

“Now they are conferring,” Kin-tan said. “They are taking their time about it. The Russian has started a cigarette.”

At this season there were no blossoms on the rhododendrons, and their odor was earthy and cool, even moist. Perhaps Greenwood did not want a reply from the Russian. This was a recess, a truce; he was lying on a hillside sniffing at shrubbery and the Wild Wa did not exist.

Olevskoy shouted, “No! Absolutely not! I will not risk an ambush!”

“I swear to you,” Greenwood shouted, “that there will be no ambush, and that you will have the freedom of the village afterward.” Distant echoes, then calm again.

Olevskoy shouted, “Do you believe in God?”

Greenwood was flabbergasted. After a moment he shouted, “No!”

“Then who are you to swear to anything?”

Greenwood laughed aloud. His spirits soared at this sudden metaphysical turn. “Do you believe in democracy?” he shouted.

The answer was immediate. “No!”

“Then why do you confer with your officers?”

“That's what officers are for!” Olevskoy called.

“He just smiled,” Kin-tan said. “I see machine guns and two of those heavy automatic rifles.”

“And they'll have grenades and small arms. We can use it all.”

Olevskoy shouted. “You must send us a hostage!”

Greenwood now translated for the Shan. Contempt crossed their faces, but they considered the demand. Jum-aw. They could offer a hostage and a guide in one person, showing good faith and common sense.

Greenwood shouted this to Olevskoy.

Olevskoy shouted, “No. No outsider. Maybe … the little girl.”

Greenwood remembered what was at stake and bit back savage obscenities, but could not disguise the anger in his voice. “We do not make war with children, Colonel. But you may take me.”

“You!” Olevskoy's acid laughter carried up the slope. “They would sacrifice you without thinking twice!”

“He tossed his head back as if in contempt,” Kin-tan reported. “The sunlight is full on them.”

Greenwood told Kin-tan what Olevskoy had said.

Kin-tan fiddled with the binoculars. Then he met Greenwood's eye and said, “For Pawlu, yes. You or any other hostage.”

“Lola? He will take Lola.”

Kin-tan's dark Oriental features twisted, altering swiftly to incomprehension, incredulity, anger; the stained teeth gritted in disdain. “Men do not think such things! By the gods! That you could even ask me!”

“I do not want to talk more to him,” Greenwood said. “The seed is planted. If we have time, we'll come back. He may change his mind.”

“He is not worth having, this Russian. But he may indeed change his mind, given time. They have no water. That one is
rude
.”

“Then I too shall be rude.”

“Please!”

“No hostage!” Greenwood shouted. “But the offer stands, and the plan is simple and strong. Afterward, you and I will fight. Do you hear me? I do not want my daughter's name in your foul mouth!”

“Then send your wife!” Olevskoy called. “American son of a bitch!”

Again they passed within reach of Thuan-yi; again he lay immobile. If he killed one? Nothing. He was within their lines, and a weasel was here more useful than a tiger. Already he had learned much. That there was hatred between the two albinos. That there was hatred between the Chinese and the Shan. That his enemy was divided by more than a road or a field, and would never be united. They might, if left properly alone, or if skillfully tricked, make corpses without help from the Wild Wa.

A choke of laughter escaped him.

“They'll be back,” Olevskoy told his majors. “They need us.”

“But I
must
go,” the Sawbwa said. His confidence was sublime and he spoke perkily, as if to children who must be humored. “Who better? All my life I have prepared for this; in my youth my fate was linked to the Russians.”

“This is courage,” Naung said.

“It is a shock,” Greenwood said, “but it makes sense.”

“There is no precedent for it,” Mong said. “I have never heard of a sawbwa leaving his village, much less as a hostage, and I do not believe that good can come of it.”

“New times, new remedies,” Wan said, “but I confess this violates my sense of the proprieties.”

“The idea makes me nervous,” said Kin-tan.

“Kin-tan nervous?
That
is without precedent.” The Sawbwa's good eye stared down at his people and their village-within-a-village, at smoke rising from a dozen campfires. “I shall go, and I shall bring them here tomorrow to exterminate these Wild Wa. After all, who else speaks Chinese? We shall suppress the Wild Wa for a generation to come.”

“The general speaks Chinese,” said Naung.

Greenwood was firm: “The general goes west with Jum-aw. Sawbwa: if this is to be done,
how
is it to be done?”

In the end it was done simply. The Sawbwa decked himself in his ceremonial gray and scarlet. Around his neck he draped strings of prayer beads, at Za-kho's instance. On his head he wore the Pawnee headband. He was placed aboard a pony.

Wan assured them once more that this side of the road was clear of Wild Wa. Eight horsemen, appropriately armed, surrounded the Sawbwa, four close, four ranging. They proceeded by the most direct route, straight through Red Bullock Pass and along the southern edge of East Poppy Field.

At the roadside they formed a defensive cluster. A curt Greenwood parleyed with Olevskoy. The Sawbwa added a word or two in creaking Yunnan Chinese. They waited, the Shan squirming in vague humiliation, while the Chinese soldiers conferred. Greenwood could not understand their talk. Probably Olevskoy was saying, “Well, they're serious,” and the majors were agreeing. Perhaps they were also discussing the shortage of water. Perhaps too the joys of village life.

Finally Olevskoy agreed. To Greenwood he said, “A truce for now.”

“For now.”

“At sunrise tomorrow we move. These hills: will your sun rise at the same hour?”

“We'll be watching,” Greenwood said. “At this end of the pass, dig in.”

Olevskoy said, “If you lay an ambush, we'll kill the lot of you. We'll roast you alive.”

“If this were an ambush we'd want you
within
the pass.”

“I've never trusted anyone,” Olevskoy said. “Not for years and years. It is not easy to start now.”

And in high state the Sawbwa, sitting his pony like a trained gibbon, crossed the road into the Chinese camp, where he became immediately the object of vulgar curiosity, and was offered whisky and cigarettes, which he declined with dignity.

In the lowering dusk Thuan-yi watched the Shan ride back into Pawlu. Here was a mystery! Strange ways indeed! These people had bound over their headman to the Chinese and one albino; and the other albino rode merrily back to Pawlu like a true Shan! This conduct was not meet. By such unseemly behavior the Shan had surely lost favor with the gods. The Shan were no longer righteous!

Exultant, Thuan-yi ghosted through the evening to rejoin his men, and to tell them what the gods had ordained.

“Try not to blame me,” Greenwood said.

“There is no blame,” Loi-mae said. “Who can say when this war began, and why, or how it will end, and why?”

“It is all one war, perhaps, with longer or shorter truces.”

Lola slept. About them in the Common Field the hum and stir of a jittery village filled the night; low talk, a snore, a cough, the drifting smoke of fires and cheroots.

“It is better not to touch,” Loi-mae said.

“Naung hates me.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Go to your daughter.' I cannot make him out. He is hot and cold.”

“Happy and sad. He has been hurt.”

“Then we shall not hurt him more.”

“We shall be virtuous, and the gods will be kind.”

Greenwood did not believe this but said, “Yes.”

Once this had been all he desired: Loi-mae, Lola, Pawlu. Now it was a place he had spoiled, on the eve of battle.

True, events have many ancestors, and there is never one that may be singled out. Yet if not for Major Wei, all might have ended otherwise, and order prevailed. Hulking, reliable Major Wei. A man of honor, a soldier of valor. With nightfall Major Wei agonized. General Yang had not lied; yet the major had expected more honorable behavior. He allowed professional latitude; superior officers were constantly issuing cryptic orders and conducting maneuvers incomprehensible to lower grades because part of a greater, unknowable whole. Major Wei needed a confidant, and time to think. But he was alone, possibly assisting a mutiny, and the decision must be his. First: he could disappear into the night and slog his way to some town. Impossible. Second: he could accept the situation and shift his allegiance to the Russian. Difficult. Third: he could follow along, and bide his time. Unworthy. Fourth: he could make his way to General Yang, confront him, warn him and judge him.