The Mercenaries Read online

  For a moment Ira longed to be able to clap him in irons or something, but the matter was unexpectedly taken out of his hands by Ellie, who delivered such a dressing-down that Fagan disappeared, crestfallen, while Sammy ripped off the engine hood and found the fault was a simple matter of a broken petrol feed which Fagan ought, if he’d bothered, to have been able to repair.

  They got away again in the afternoon and eventually they came to the curving river once more with its old forts and fir trees, and the camphor, bamboo, cinnamon and mulberry groves that surrounded the little homesteads. Hwai-Yang came up at last, recognisable at once by the huge stone Tien An-Men stairway that rose from the river to the centre of the city, like a great smooth scar across its face. The steps were teeming with people and, as he passed overhead, Ira could see coolies carrying loads and sedan chairs moving up and down among the crowds gazing up at him.

  He circled the city for a while, looking for the field. There was no sign of any landing area but what were clearly hangars, barracks and sheds stood grouped together on the edge of a small open space to the north, next to a field of maize. There were a dozen oxen crossing it, however, followed by two coolies and a straggling group of stark-naked children and, seething with fury, Ira wondered what had happened to the markings he’d asked Geary and Lawn to set out.

  For a while he circled the open space by the hangars, followed by the other two machines, looking for a marked area and smoke to give him the direction of the wind, then, pushing the stick forward, he slipped downwards in a long curving glide for a landing over the maize field and the deep ditch that separated it from the space in front of the hangars.

  With difficulty, he avoided the oxen, the coolies and the gaping children in their cane disc hats, and the wheels had just touched when he realised the surface of the field was covered with potholes and deep tracks. A wheel bounced in one of the holes, leapt up, bounced again, with Ira hanging grimly on to the stick to avoid a ground-loop and Sammy thrown half-out of the passenger cockpit, then the tyre burst as it struck another rut and, as it rolled to a stop, the wheel buckled and the machine slewed round with a scraping of metal and the rending of fabric.

  Almost before it came to a stop in a drifting cloud of dust and flecks of grass, Ira had leapt from the cockpit and was running across the field, waving frantically. The Albatros was coming in just above his head, but thankfully he heard the engine roar as the throttle was opened and it lifted away again, followed by the Fokker.

  Sammy had joined him now, stumbling in his heavy flying clothes, and Ira waved him across the field.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sammy,’ he snarled. ‘Get those bloody cows out of the way and find a flat patch!’

  While the other two machines circled, they ran across the field, sweating in their leather coats, looking for an area that was clear of pot-holes, but the field seemed to have been trampled by thousands of feet out of solid mud in which the ruts that had wrecked the Avro had been gouged by heavy vehicles when the ground was soft.

  Ira stared about him in fury, all the disappointments and delays of the past few weeks coming to a head in a mounting swelling of rage. In spite of all that had been promised and not done, in spite of all the mistakes and of the Chinese compradores, they had managed to reach Hwai-Yang, and it was clear already that it was all going to start all over again, and to a worse degree. The field had obviously been used for everything but flying, and now, with the drier weather, the ruts in its surface had hardened into foot-deep gullies and shallow ditches with knee-high grass hiding the bone-hard sides.

  Raging but relieved, Ira saw the wheels of the other two machines touch one after the other on the flat ground they had found at the far side of the field, and as they began to jolt and rattle towards the hangars, he started to jogtrot after them.

  Stopping in front of the sheds, Fagan switched off and climbed out.

  ‘Saw you hopping about like a dog with a weak bladder,’ he said with a hoot of laughter as Ira panted up. ‘Pity you crashed.’

  He stared about him as the desolation of the field suddenly struck him, and his eyes widened.

  ‘Great gold teeth of God,’ he bleated, ‘what the hell have we let ourselves in for?’

  The field was even bleaker than the one they’d left at Linchu, and it was obvious even from a distance that the canvas Bessoneau hangars flapping in the breeze were old, rotten and badly torn. The sheds were tin-roofed, lurching and lopsided and the barracks were a sad cluster of single-storeyed buildings that looked as though they’d been stripped by a bomb.

  ‘Looks like the Marines have landed,’ Ellie commented laconically.

  ‘Looks like they’ve taken off again, too,’ Sammy added. ‘Lor’, Ira, this is worse than Linchu.’

  As they stood in a group, staring about them, from behind the wood-and-tin sheds came a string of cars, most of them small and all of them ancient – a Morris, a Peugeot, a Hispano, a Lanchester, a Pierce-Arrow, and one or two others Ira couldn’t recognise. They stopped near the aircraft and what appeared to be dozens of Chinese officers climbed out and began to walk towards them, keeping a respectful distance from the leader, who appeared to be General Tsu.

  The general had an aristocratic face, cultivated and hard as jade, and he wore wide trousers and tartan slippers and a woollen gown like a tent. Behind him he trailed a sword as long as himself. Following him, Ira recognised Lao, the Chinese who had got his name on the contract in Africa, dressed in uniform now with a neatly fastened collar and flat breast pockets, and a yellow cord over his shoulder to indicate he was an aide.

  Tsu was bowing, holding his hands inside his wide sleeves, and someone began to intone titles from beyond the slapping silk umbrella that had been hastily erected. ‘Tsu Li-Fo, Baptist General, Pride of the Missionaries, Warlord of the South-West, welcomes the illustrious fliers from across the sea!’

  Fagan gave a shrill bark of derisive laughter. ‘Holy God,’ he said. ‘The illustrious fliers from across the sea wish to Christ they were back where they came from, and that’s a fact!’

  Lao stepped in front of them, brisk and arrogant. ‘Why have you broken the aeroplane?’ he said. ‘The general is very expert on aeroplanes.’

  The general, waiting under his silk umbrella, nodded placidly.

  Ira stared back at Lao, his brows down and furious with rage. ‘The general knows as much about flying as a bloody turtle,’ he snapped. ‘And so do you! Why wasn’t the ditch flagged and the field marked properly? And what made those damn great grooves?’

  Lao stepped back, startled by the attack. ‘Guns, of course,’ he said quickly. ‘And carts. The general used this land to drill his troops during the rainy season when there was no fighting.’

  ‘Well, you can tell the general that the whole bloody lot’ll have to be levelled again and all the ruts filled in. Every pothole, every ditch, every bump. And why aren’t the mechanics here? Why didn’t they mark the strip?’

  Lao drew himself up, his lip curling. ‘Your mechanics have not yet appeared,’ he said. ‘They weren’t on the Fan-Ling when it arrived in Hwai-Yang.’

  Ira turned, still angry, his rage all the greater from the sick disappointment inside him, and the feeling that in coming to China he’d stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. Conditions at Moshi had not been good but here they seemed to be appalling.

  He swung round, ignoring Lao, looking for Tsu’s legendary aircraft, but the general hurriedly jabbed at Lao with his stick and the two of them spoke together in Chinese. Lao turned to Ira again, smiling and subservient.

  ‘The Warlord of the South-West,’ he announced, ‘says that the time is not now appropriate to see his aeroplanes. He is anxious to put on a parade for his new and illustrious friends, and he suggests you have dinner with him at his house this evening when the inspection will be made. In the meantime you will perhaps care to see your hotel.’

  * * *

  Hwai-Yang had grown up as a centre to exchange the coolies’ rice, meat and
silk for thread, cloth and kerosene, but as it was not a treaty port, there were no foreign officials and no Sikh policemen to maintain order. Tricolours, Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks were flying on the properties of Chinese merchants, however, in the hope that they would protect them from the disputing warlords, but the law seemed to be administered only by Tsu’s soldiers, shabby little men in grey cotton uniforms with ancient rifles, some of them still even wearing the pigtail.

  Their mild appearance was misleading, however, and as Tsu’s cars transported them across the city, they passed a couple of mule carts containing Chinese with their heads shaved and their hands bound behind their backs.

  ‘Criminals?’ Ellie asked.

  Lao shrugged. ‘They are to be executed,’ he said calmly, ‘for refusing to pay taxes.’

  ‘Executed?’ Ellie’s eyes widened. ‘You mean hanged?’

  ‘I mean executed. Beheaded.’

  Ellie’s face went pale then her eyes became furious. ‘You can’t behead people,’ she snapped. ‘Not in a civilised country.’

  Lao gestured. ‘This is not a civilised country,’ he said mildly. ‘Not these days.’

  She turned, staring narrow-eyed at the condemned men, and Fagan slapped her knee with one of his great hands. ‘This is China, old girl,’ he said with a loud laugh, ‘not the good old USA, the land of the free.’

  She turned again and stared once more at the carts, her mouth tight. The soldiers were pushing the men out of the carts now on the roadside, and a coolie with a long sword joined them. As the men began to kneel down in a long line, she turned away abruptly.

  * * *

  Hwai-Yang was a rural city and its smells were those of a great feudal village. Outside the gates were a row of hovels of dried mud, so dilapidated they looked as though a good shove would lay the lot flat. The walls themselves, old, crenellated, twelve feet thick and covered at the top with weeds and nettles, overhung the Yangtze, wide enough for carts and barrows to move along them, and beyond them the refuse of the coolies’ huts was dumped along the riverbank in a humming cloud of flies.

  The streets inside the city, however, were full of elegant lattice work – red and gold and elaborately carved, and decrepit with disrepair. They were ear-splitting with the cries of street hawkers and coolies shouting a way for their loads, and jammed with people surging along the narrow uneven footwalks round the deep stagnant green pools that filled the holes where paving blocks had been stolen to make bases for clay household stoves.

  The hotel where Lao had reserved rooms for them turned out to be a drab dusty building stinking of drains, with a fly-spotted picture of Calvin Coolidge over the desk to indicate its Westernisation and chickens scratching outside the entrance for scraps thrown out from the dining room. Though he’d felt at the airfield that he’d reached the very limit of disappointment, Ira, holding his bag in the hall and staring round at the dusty interior with its wilting palms and fading gilt and the fawning and not very clean Chinese kow-towing in front of him, felt his heart sink.

  None of them fancied staying and they turned on Lao in a body and insisted on searching for a house to rent. With his none-too-willing help, two small furnished bungalows, full of Chinese perfectionism and exquisite nothings, were eventually discovered in a large garden full of flame trees and red jasmine by the city walls. Between them there was a low grey-roofed pavilion and an ornamental zigzag bridge over a lily pond that contained huge black and silver fish. It was only later that they discovered the owners and their families had been thrown out neck and crop to make room for them.

  By the evening, they had established themselves inside, Ira and Sammy sharing one and Fagan and Ellie the other, Ellie enchanted with the Chinese bric-à-brac, her grave unsmiling face suffused with pleasure as she moved through the rooms touching things with her fingertips, her eyes bright, her expression warm and soft.

  As they stood on the verandah, the anger over the method of their arrival subsiding in thoughts of a settled existence, a cart appeared with an assortment of house-servants, all carrying their own pots and pans, their shaven heads polished like ancient stones, their smiles wide and friendly. They were still establishing themselves at the back of the houses when a palanquin with silk curtains also stopped outside. Ira and Sammy stared at it with interest. It seemed to indicate all kinds of Oriental mysteries.

  ‘What do you reckon this is, Sammy?’ Ira asked.

  Sammy grinned. ‘Tsu’s missis come to make the beds,’ he suggested.

  As the curtains were pulled aside, a Chinese girl, small, dainty and attractive, stepped down, carrying a cage containing two bright birds. She paused, looked round, spoke to one of the servants and promptly headed for the bungalow.

  ‘Well, she seems to belong to us, not to Fagan,’ Ira pointed out.

  They met the girl as she entered the house. She had sloe eyes with lashes like fans, and a peach colour whipped into her cheeks by the boisterous breeze. Her possessions seemed to consist of the caged birds and one small bundle tied up in a silk shawl.

  She bobbed her head, smiled to show teeth that were startlingly white and made a delicate gesture with a long thin hand. ‘Mei-Mei,’ she said. ‘Mei-Mei.’

  The words sounded vaguely like an incantation, and Ira and Sammy stared at each other.

  ‘Perhaps it’s her name,’ Sammy suggested. He jabbed himself enthusiastically. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘Sammy.’ He jabbed at Ira. ‘Him. Ira.’ He indicated the girl. ‘You. Mei-Mei?’

  She nodded and smiled, and Sammy grinned. ‘Well, at least we know her name,’ he said.

  She spoke in Chinese to one of the servants and he led her away through the house, trailing a scent of mint and musk, and they were still unpacking the few things they’d brought with them when a young Chinese officer, with the yellow cord of an aide on his shoulder, arrived with a portentous-looking document on red tissue paper the size of a newspaper, the formal invitation to General Tsu’s house.

  ‘I am Lieutenant Kee, you know,’ he said, in good if somewhat stylised English. ‘Colonel Lao has appointed me to your staff. Whatever you want, you are to ask me, and I will jolly well attend to it.’

  It was a warm evening, with a rich amber sky shining above the decorated curving roofs, when three sedan chairs, ornately carved and painted and with curtains of dirty yellow silk, arrived outside. Sagging in the heat and feeling like mandarins behind the curtains, they set off at a quick shuffle past the shops, handed over the heads of the crowds who were cleared by an officious small boy going ahead shouting what appeared to be their honours and titles – and probably also a few choice insults – at the top of his voice. Surrounded by toothy Chinese grins, they went down a dirty alley where the thunk-thunk of woodcarving and the clink of hammers on metal sounded like Chinese music. The smell was one of sewers, charcoal, camphorwood and lacquer.

  The streets grew narrower until they were mere tunnels roofed with bamboo matting, then they crossed an open place fronted with temples studded with Buddhas and fierce idols that glared from the doors. Occasional white businessmen in chairs and a few missionaries in their sombre clothes passed them, then as they left the centre of the town, they turned into another alley and finally disappeared through a circular moon-gate in a wall.

  Inside was a forecourt full of white pigeons and littered with rubbish where a few soldiers, chewing sunflower seeds and incongruous and unmilitary in ill-fitting uniforms and bus conductors’ hats, lounged about emptying their bronchial tubes into the dust. Kee screamed at them to pick up the rifles lying among the rubbish and got them into a sagging line that constantly ballooned out as they edged forward, chattering and bursting with curiosity, their antiquated weapons at all angles, to see who had arrived. A deafening blast from a bugle which appeared to be well out of tune set the pigeons clattering into the air and brought the chair-coolies to a standstill, hawking and spitting and wiping away the sweat. It was hard to believe that the noisy waving of rifles was an attempt to present arms.
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br />   While they were still wondering how to respond to the gesture, Lao appeared with a drawn sword and led them through another circular gate into a garden which was so different from the courtyard it could have been in another part of China. There was a bright lawn, a clump of feathery bamboo and a willow drooping over the lilies in a small pool. The room beyond was barely furnished, but with bronze, lacquer, tortoiseshell and ivory objets d’art. The wall decorations seemed to consist only of two scrolls, each with a line of Chinese lettering, exquisitely drawn. A small bamboo table and an old-fashioned pianola completed the furniture.

  General Tsu came forward to meet them, carrying a gold-mounted cane and wearing a skull cap with the red button of authority. His grey silk gown was even more voluminous than the one he’d worn on their arrival but his feet were still thrust into his tartan carpet slippers.

  Behind him was a group of other officers, all wearing ill-fitting cotton uniforms with stiff Prussian collars. Some of them wore riding breeches with puttees, and some of them flannel trousers with elastic-sided boots, but they all had strapped to their waists revolvers and swords which they clearly had no intention of removing merely for a meal.

  ‘Colonel Tong So-Lin.’ Lao began the introductions with a small stout Chinese whose wide mouth seemed to be packed to capacity with gold teeth. ‘In command of General Tsu’s artillery. Colonel Chok Wo. In command of the cavalry. Colonel Ching Kuey. Supplies…’

  Grubby-looking biscuits and sticky drinks in small glasses were handed round, then dinner was announced by a cracked gong and there was a great deal of fuss as they all tried to sit down simultaneously.

  ‘It would be jolly impolite to be seated while someone else is still standing,’ Kee explained in a whisper. ‘We must all sit together, you know.’

  When they were all finally seated Tsu rose and placed his hands together inside his sleeves.

  ‘Ah Fah-Wui charred in heaven,’ he intoned. ‘Heh-Lo be thy name.’