The Mercenaries Read online

  ‘Lor’, don’t it bugle?’ Sammy commented, wrinkling his nose. ‘I’d rather have Mei-Mei’s joss, I reckon.’

  They peeped back in the house, but Mei-Mei was still doing obeisances on the floor and, feeling vaguely as though they were intruding on some private ceremony, they retreated once more to the verandah, eager for food but uncertain whether to join in her devotions or ignore her.

  Just inside a room on the next verandah they could see Ellie washing herself, half-naked as usual, a macaw-coloured pareu she’d bought the day before knotted round her waist.

  ‘Why’s she always do it where we can see her?’ Sammy asked wonderingly.

  Fagan’s voice came across to them. He was singing in a dubious baritone, which he kept interrupting to shout to Ellie. They seemed to have recovered their good temper, a strange bewildered lost couple who never seemed to know whether they were happy in each other’s company or not.

  After a while Fagan joined Ellie on the verandah and they saw him sponging her back, an operation which finally dissolved into a wrestling match that ended abruptly as he snatched away the pareu. For a while, they struggled, Ellie red-faced and shrieking and Fagan shouting with laughter, then he grabbed her in his arms and carried her screaming out of sight. For a while the shrieks continued across Fagan’s half-witted laughter, then they died away to a heavy silence.

  Sammy turned to Ira. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than fighting,’ he observed.

  Mei-Mei was still waiting for them as they left their room, and they stopped in front of her, uncertain and baffled. Their ablutions had been conducted entirely by the houseboy who had been ready with tin bath, soap, water, sponge and toothbrushes without ever really being visible, and Ira wondered uneasily if Mei-Mei’s duties involved something similar.

  Since she couldn’t speak English, she was unable to enlighten them, and Sammy opened the play by slapping her behind as he passed her.

  ‘’Mornin’,’ he said gaily.

  ‘Mo-Nin?’ She gestured with fluttering hands at him.

  Sammy shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m Sammy. Me – Sammy. Him – Ira. You – Mei-Mei. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ She beamed and followed them through to the dining area. She didn’t appear to have anything to do with the breakfast of chicken and noodles, however, or even the ceremony with incense sticks, prayer paper and fireworks that preceded it, and merely sat watching as the houseboy brought in the food, waiting with her birdcage and a cup of green tea for them to finish.

  ‘What do you reckon she’s for?’ Ira asked as they went outside to wait for the ancient Peugeot Lao had promised to send for them.

  ‘Gawd knows. Just decoration perhaps, like a geisha.’ Sammy turned and waved to the girl waiting on the steps of the bungalow. ‘So long, Mei-Mei.’

  ‘So-Long?’

  ‘So long. Goodbye.’

  Her grave face broke into a smile and she waved. ‘Gu-Bai. Me Mei-Mei. You Sah-Mee. Him Ai-Lah.’

  Sammy nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’re catching on. Me Sammy. Him Ira.’ He turned to Ira as she disappeared inside the bungalow. ‘Conversation’s a bit limited, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Fagan’s outburst the night before seemed to have done him good and he turned up at the field later in the day beaming with good nature but still unpredictable, stormy and likely to explode into a doom-laden mood at any moment.

  ‘Whatever it was he got,’ Sammy chuckled, ‘he obviously enjoyed it.’

  Ellie was warmer and more friendly, too, her face attractive under the short blonde curls. Fagan seemed to have got round her very effectively during the night and the frozen-faced anger at his behaviour the evening before had gone.

  Since there was no one on the field to stop them, not even a night watchman, they moved among Tsu’s old aeroplanes, climbing into cockpits and testing flabby controls, feeling compression and running their hands over rotten fabric and struts devoid of varnish. Only the Aviatik, Yang’s machine, seemed to be airworthy.

  ‘Even that’s sagging like a busted balloon,’ Sammy observed.

  Eventually they dug out a few of the tools they’d brought with them for running repairs and took off the engine cowlings. Perished rubber, verdigris and rust met their eyes.

  ‘All right for scrap,’ Ellie commented shortly.

  ‘Farman might make it,’ Sammy pointed out shrewdly. ‘We might make the Crossley go, too, and the Albion’s got a dynamo we can use.’

  Reaching across the cockpit of the wingless D7, Ira cocked the guns and pressed the trigger, listening to the thump as the breech blocks shot home.

  ‘Guns work,’ he commented with a grin. ‘So would the interrupter, I think. If this wingless wonder only had wings it could do a lot of damage. Still, it’s got a propeller and we can use it for spares.’

  Later in the day, Kee appeared and borrowed a few more tools for them, but there was little they could do until Geary and Lawn and their crates of spares turned up.

  ‘Why should we worry?’ Sammy said. ‘It’s not our war.’

  For three days no one came near them except Lieutenant Kee, but he was only concerned with their comfort.

  ‘Everything is satisfactory?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What ho! The bungalow is OK?’

  ‘The bungalow’s fine.’

  ‘Jolly decent! I say, how is the girl?’

  ‘Girl?’ Ira stared at him.

  ‘Good gracious my, the one the general sent to you.’

  ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Ira nodded enthusiastically.

  Kee seemed pleased and went away and, for lack of anything else to do, they began to work on the ancient Crossley. When they came to a full stop for lack of tools, they hired sedan chairs and explored the old city, a mass of Ming-type buildings with green roofs, up-curved so that demons sliding down them might do themselves a mischief as they dropped off the eaves. There was a half-hidden lake with stiff lotuses spread on a glistening grey surface that was fringed with willows and wisteria, and behind the town, rising out of the ash-coloured hills, a miniature square-topped mountain like a cottage loaf, red-brown at the base and fading to a pink-blue at its summit.

  On closer acquaintance, the majestic city walls along the river turned out to be festooned with washing, and more was flapping along the steps and under the arches where the great iron-studded gates stood open. Everything in Hwai-Yang seemed to be done by hand. There was no water except for what the coolies carried, and no light at night apart from bobbing paper lanterns.

  Dragon bridges and pagodas rubbed shoulders with fountains and marble tombs guarded by snarling monsters; and there were joss houses full of strange deities and redolent with perfumed smoke where women burned incense for easy childbirth; and outdoor theatres where crowds of people watched, happily eating highly coloured sweets and spitting sunflower seeds or having their ears cleaned by professional aurists moving among the seats. Camel trains and shaggy sore-backed mules shoved through the pedestrians picking their way round the heaps of dirt where babies and scavenging pigs wallowed together. A group of Tsu soldiers, sly, sullen and hangdog, moved past, slouching and slovenly and hung about with teapots, saucepans and umbrellas. They were pushing ahead of them a bunch of lunatics, lepers and criminals who were tied together by their pigtails, wailing and shrieking and gibbering. The crowd watched impassively – idlers carrying singing birds on the end of a stick or hovering over a cricket fight; letter-writers with horn spectacles on the ends of their noses and their crinkly red paper under their arms on the look-out for lovesick youths or enamelled-faced courtesans who might need their skill; nomad horsemen from the north sucking toffee apples as they stared at the shops; old ivoried men with fans and black-garbed peasants carrying aged relatives on their shoulders; and tiny doll-like children, their hair plaited into stiff tufts about their heads, chirruping like flocks of gaily coloured birds. It was all so incredible it took their breath away.

  Because of the steep streets and that
vast swathe of enormous stone steps that cut the town in half like a huge wound, there were no wheeled vehicles in the centre of the city – only sedan chairs carried by yelling baggy-trousered coolies, callouses on their shoulders as big as oranges, who ran up and down like ants to the river, the alleyways full of their noise. There seemed to be bells tinkling everywhere, and the whole city seemed to be filled with resonance and the clip-trotting of ponies.

  There were only a few foreign export and import agencies along the bund, but a solid mat of junks affronted with masts heaved and rolled among the garbage between the sandbanks. Along the river, to right and left of the Tien An-Men steps, there were low warehouses and godowns roofed with chocolate-coloured tiles. Near them, on the stone steps of the wharf, girls waited for the sailors off the foreign gunboats that stopped occasionally to water, full-lipped, jet-eyed and bored, leaning against the bars with their daubed signs. ENGLIS BEER. GIN SLINGS. LADIES FOR SAILORS.

  The beer was warm and synthetic, however, and the stench in the narrow medieval streets appalling, and Sammy seemed awed by the place.

  ‘There are such a lot of the bastards, Ira,’ he said. ‘What’d happen if they decided they didn’t want us?’

  As the days passed, they began to grow bored with having nothing to do and occasionally they begged shaggy ponies from the pupil pilots who kept them in Kailin for their personal transport, or borrowed dubious guns and got themselves rowed out into the Yung Ling Lakes, a string of bright pools just to the south that were separated by strips of marsh and reed. The lakes were the home of countless snipe, woodcock, duck and geese which rose in honking hordes into the blood-red sunsets as they pulled the triggers, great islands of what at first had seemed weeds lifting uncertainly along the edges with the beat of wings and the spattering of webbed feet on water, until the sky was black with circling birds.

  Despite his boast, Fagan, always the sad imposter, wasn’t any more gifted with a gun than he was with an aeroplane, and even his shooting seemed dogged by farce. When he almost blew Ellie’s head off in his excitement she turned on him in savage disgust and swung at him with the soggy corpse of a duck she was just lifting from the water, and he disappeared overboard with a splash and a hoot of giggling laughter from the Chinese boatman. He returned to the bungalow, noisily indignant and sour-faced, and the following day when Ira wasn’t looking he sneaked into the air with the Fokker and set off east to look for Kwei’s legendary balloon. He’d been talking for some time about it, itching to do it some damage, and he returned in such a flurry of excitement to tell them he’d found it, he overshot the inadequate field and dropped his nose into the ditch at the end.

  Ira’s fury did nothing to damp his enthusiasm. ‘As God’s me judge, I saw it,’ he explained loudly, wiping away the blood where he’d banged his nose on the dashboard. ‘Like a bladder of lard it looked, and with so many patches, you’d only have to stick a pin in it to deflate it.’

  * * *

  For a fortnight, apart from throwing a rope over the Fokker’s tail and dragging it off to the hangars to remove the stump of propeller, they did little at the airfield except organise strange games of polo with the pupil-pilots, which came to an abrupt end when Fagan, showing off his prowess as a rider, inevitably got himself kicked by one of the shaggy ponies. They had just helped him to the office in the barrack block when, to their surprise, one of the cars from Tsu’s cavalcade arrived. In the rear seat was the Baptist General himself, wearing a woollen gown and a bowler hat and huddled against the cool wind in an expensive sable fur. Lao and Kee were with him, and Yang arrived soon afterwards in another car, still thunderous with rage.

  Lao seemed to have accepted that most of the machines they had so laboriously assembled were never going to fly, but he still seemed concerned about the summer campaigning.

  Carefully, Ira explained that a pupil-pilot would need around ten hours of flying instruction before he was even capable of taking up an aeroplane alone and that not even then would he be capable of giving battle, not even with General Kwei’s unarmed balloon.

  ‘If the general’s so keen,’ he said, ‘what’s wrong with Captain Yang?’

  Lao suddenly didn’t seem to think much of Captain Yang and offered them 200 American dollars for the destruction of the balloon.

  ‘Let’s be havin’ that down on paper,’ Fagan suggested eagerly. ‘I know where it is.’

  Ira shook his head stubbornly, not retreating an inch. ‘It’s no good,’ he explained to Lao. ‘Before we can do a thing, you’ve got to find tools and spares.’

  He was fighting for elementary safety, even here in this godforsaken place where there were no airworthy planes and even less in the way of spare parts.

  ‘We even need a windsock,’ he said firmly. ‘And there’s no ground organisation whatsoever, no transport, no engineering sheds, no coolies, no equipment, nothing. I’m not going to let anyone up into the air – neither your pupils nor any of the people who came with me – until we find a field bigger and flatter than this to fly from.’

  * * *

  It rained during the night, a heavy downpour that changed the beaten dust of the field into a bog, and the following morning with the earth steaming under the sun’s rays and the early spring scents making themselves felt, Ira arrived to find an army of coolies had already been mustered from somewhere by Lao. He had been hunting through the godowns along the bund in the hope of unearthing a few of their possessions and appeared late, frustrated and furious, to find things transformed.

  Already the maize in the next field had been trampled flat and trees were being dragged away, while earth was being packed into the ditch between from baskets that were passed down a long column of men and women snaking across the field herded by a line of shabby soldiers with ancient Martini rifles.

  ‘What in God’s name’s going on?’ he asked.

  Sammy grinned. ‘They’re going to join the two fields,’ he said. ‘It was Lao’s idea.’

  Ira stared at the horde of blue-clad figures, some of them convicts with heavy wooden collars round their necks, pushing barrows and chopping at the earth, bare-legged yellow ants with straw hats and strange medieval tools, hacking civilisation yard by yard with their hands from the ground itself, under the direction of Lieutenant Kee, who appeared to be taking his orders from Sammy. Hundreds more men were working at the other side of the ditch, rank after rank of them, digging and shovelling to the sound of a prearranged rhythm.

  ‘What about the owner of the maize?’ he asked.

  Sammy shrugged, unconcerned. ‘It didn’t look as though he was getting much compensation,’ he said. ‘They marched him off between two soldiers.’

  Lao was waiting for them with Yang as they returned to the battered Bessoneaux. ‘You are pleased?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ Ira said. ‘Now,’ he went on briskly, ‘we shall need transport.’

  Lao’s face fell. ‘You are difficult to satisfy, Major Penaluna,’ he said bitterly.

  Ira grinned. ‘I’m asking for the barest essentials,’ he pointed out cheerfully. ‘Lorries are among them. I want at least one. We can probably make that other old wreck work if we can find some tyres. And I want a car. So far we’re having to use rickshaws or ponies to get out to the field, and none of them are very fast.’

  ‘There aren’t any cars in Hwai-Yang,’ Yang snapped. ‘This isn’t Shanghai.’

  Ira smiled at him. ‘Then you’d better let us have yours,’ he suggested. ‘I also want a couple of good carpenters, and one or two intelligent coolies to work with the aircraft.’

  Lao pulled a face but he agreed, and that afternoon Sammy pushed and chivvied half a dozen wriggling young Chinese into the hut where Ira had set up the beginnings of a flight office and was scowling at the creased, dirty, rat-gnawed, dog-eared scraps of paper that Yang called inspection sheets and log books. Behind the three youths were two older Chinese and Sammy had made them all laugh somehow and they were giggling and good-humoured and not a bit
like the inscrutable Chinese they’d been led to expect.

  ‘Carpenters,’ Sammy said gaily. ‘Wang Li-Jen. Yen Hsu. The kids are coolies for the aircraft.’

  Wang had a picture of King George torn from a magazine tacked to his shirt. ‘Wang work for Blitish,’ he explained, jabbing a dirty thumb at the portrait. ‘This Blitish Number One Joss Man. Plenchee good for Wang.’

  Fagan arrived late in a bad temper and with a monumental hangover. He and Ellie had been fighting during the night, and Ira wasn’t surprised to find him stamping about like a cyclone in a barrel, chewing at a cigar.

  ‘I’d shoot that bloody Yang if I was the Pride of the Missionaries,’ he said. ‘He’s never done a thing round here except maybe fart “Annie Laurie” through a keyhole now and then like Paddy’s pig. We should all pack up and bugger off home. The pubs’ll just be openin’ in O’Connell Street.’

  Ira glanced quickly at Ellie, half-hoping she’d agree on the spot, but she frowned and made a slicing angry gesture with her hand. ‘We can’t afford to go home,’ she said in a low voice, and Fagan gave his yelp of laughter and pointed at her.

  ‘Sure, females are queer things with their wee womany worries,’ he said brutally. ‘She’s been dreein’ her weird about havin’ a house for the first time in her life. She wants to hang up some curtains or something.’

  Ellie said nothing, standing with her fists clenched, as though he set every nerve in her body on edge.

  ‘Somebody’ll have to go and see Kowalski,’ Ira pointed out. ‘I’ve got a list as long as your arm of things we need. We can screw a note out of Lao authorising it all.’ He glanced hopefully at Fagan, hoping he’d jump at the chance. Once at the coast, he suspected, he’d board the first boat home.