Authors: Kin Law
All the rooms looked the same, but as he traversed them, he thought he could feel the tilt of them a little more clearly. Later, an older Albion would call this ‘getting his air legs,’ but for the boy who would grow to be the Manchu Marauder, all of this was new.
At the end of the rooms full of crates, there was a stairway, just as tilted as the rest of the rooms. The boy climbed them apprehensively, clinging to the splintery steps with his bare toes. He was deathly afraid of what lay above. What if the Syndicate men were there? Would they accuse him of stealing? They would chop off his hands with cleavers. Yet, there was nothing for him down here, the boy knew instinctively. He had to pus
h forward, or be crushed by heavy shapes in the dark.
When he reached the top of the stair, he simply stood there, in shock. He was on another wooden
floor, only there was clear sky around him, unframed by the buildings of the Walled City. Someone had taken down the walls, and ripped the sky open. Maybe the same someone had set fire to everything below, lighting the sky with the blaze of everything the boy had ever known. Before he could comprehend what had happened, the wooden floor was tipping once again, and the boy found himself tipping with it, inexplicably, head over heels into thin air.
An older Albion found out, much later, what had actually happened. The Hong Kong government, ostensibly a part of Imperial Canton but actually on a hundred-year loan to the British Isles, had had enough of the wanton lawlessness of the Kowloon Walled City.
They had mounted an attack on its known crime lords with road engines, flying cogs and armed soldiers, firebombing the worst of the corruption and cutting away the rest with bayonets.
The Britons had little sympathy for those Chinese innocents still trapped inside.
Like a pile of oily rags coming into contact with a lit match, the place erupted into an inferno of violence. What the child had seen was only a small part. The Syndicate men had mustered their forces, wielding cycle chains, watermelon knives, and cleavers, anything at hand to serve as a weapon. Like their ancient predecessors, rebels and remnants of conquered dynasties, they were hardy, revolutionary men- but they were used to subterfuge and scare tactics, not strategic warfare. Even those lieutenants and captains in the Hong Kong militia, who were used to finding parts of their loved ones secreted away as warnings in their desks, had nothing to fear from laying siege to the triad gangsters behind ratcheting gun barrels.
The boy Albion had stumbled onto a small dirigible docked at
the Walled City, its hold open connected to the Century Syndicate’s den. When the attack began, the Syndicate leaders crowded aboard and cut the airship loose. Halfway out over the flames, one of the British engines spotted the rats deserting ship. They launched firebombs at the little craft, upending it and tipping the boy overboard.
The boy knew none of this. What he knew was he was falling, and maybe burning. He could certainly feel the heat of the flames washing over him, a vast plateau of heat exactly as large as the Kowloon Walled City. It smelled, too, of smoke, piss and poverty.
All of a sudden, he was disgusted.
He knew he should care about the little knot of people somewhere in the City, those people he had lived with all his life, those who shared his blood.
Everyone had told him so.
The Chinese were a people who never forgot where they came from. Their holidays were all about remembering those who came before, visiting the graves, keeping old heroes alive, remembering debts generations old. Their future was more of the same: living, breeding, going about their business, heads ducked down.
But now, as he faced his doom, the boy who would be Albion simply did not care. It seemed like all those precious things were worth exactly nothing. All those people in the Kowloon Walled City treasured exactly those things, but there they all were, stuck in a festering hole together, burning. When had his ancestors ever left him anything but pain, hard work and suffering? His own father had refused to forgive him, and sent him to this stupid, meaningless death.
If he had his older voice, he might have screamed at them, something like ‘Fuck you. You can all go to hell. I lived eleven years and not once did any of you precious ancestors help me!’ right before he hit the cold shock of Victoria Harbor.
What they told him, when he woke up shivering and cold on another unfamiliar airship deck, was piecemeal and disjointed. He only remembered the warm touch of a hand at his back, and the taste of hot cocoa. It was the first time he ever had it, and the smell shook his whole world.
Later, Albion would rediscover his birth peoples’ fineries, tea being paramount. But at the moment, with Auntie’s chocolate and Auntie’s bowl of chicken soup, it seemed like the boy had been living in a world completely shut off from reality.
Everything in Kowloon seemed at the bottom of a well, and the little piece of sky he had seen from it was suddenly all around him. He could see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Everything was fresh, new and wonderful, and he wanted more of it.
He would give his right arm to have more of it, new tastes, new cultures, a new life.
The ship was called the
Huckleberry
, her Captain, Samuel Jebediah Clemens of Jackson, Missisippi. He was a proud man who wore a proud brown moustache, with a penchant for cigars and ‘Chester rifles. He spoke in a slow drawl, smelled of his sickening bottles and disliked children. It was hard to understand why his crew was so devoted to him, until they sailed over the remains of the Walled City. Captain Sam asked the boy, in halting Cantonese, which part of the massive phalanx of dwellings he called home. The boy pointed to a section of the City gutted and black, and the Captain merely grunted and said:
“That’s no place I’d leave even a dog. You’re coming with me, boy.”
Passage aboard the
Berry
was not free. The boy helped Auntie with her myriad shipboard tasks, followed Cid Tanner around running wrenches and loosing bolts. The Captain, in his spare time, taught him the rudiments of navigation, and shooting, and most importantly, what scraps of language he could. His days were long, and nights no less tiring than in the Walled City, but the boy was learning, and moving, and it made all the difference in the world.
It didn’t take the boy long to figure out Captain Sam was a pirate. The Walled City supplied many of the same type, and the boy had long ago learned crooks were not always untrustworthy. Sam, at least, was a crook who traveled, and all travelers are great lovers of books.
As soon as he had his English letters, the boy began attacking the Captain’s stash in the hold, a veritable mountain of literature.
Though he couldn’t always understand the people and places inside, they opened up a brand new vista, and so long as he was on the
Berry,
she promised to bring him to any of those places that lived in black and white on the page.
Flying from port to port, devouring what knowledge he could in his spare moments, the boy eventually built some understanding of his place in the world. Kowloon and Hong Kong culture was very different from even the Imperial Canton or the Commonwealth
Republic.
It befuddled him when he discovered his ancestral brethren shared none of the practices he took for granted. The ruling British had influenced how he and his family behaved, from afternoon tea in the dank, greasy tearooms of the Kowloon Walled City to their everyday courtesies towards neighbors.
Those same mannerisms seemed to serve him better in a world mostly conquered by the Britons’ dirigible fleets. Besides, he was now picking up brand new habits from the motley crew of the
Berry.
The name was no accident.
“Albion,” the boy said to the Captain one evening at the dinner table. The Captain looked up from cleaning his rifle, and grunted inquisitively.
“It’s what I’m calling myself,” Albion insisted, stabbing at his trout.
“Albion Clemens. I like it,” Sam grunted in reply, tossed back a dram of bourbon, and gone back to cleaning his gun. Albion never felt anything like he felt that moment, and never would again.
It wasn’t all gallivanting about and performing acts of daring villainy. Often the life of piracy involved sitting or sailing for long stretches, veritable deserts of monotony.
It was the perfect environs for reading, or playing chess with Cid, or learning how to perfectly poach eggs with Auntie. Yet, as Albion rushed about fulfilling his elders’ amused requests, he often looked towards the forecastle, where Captain Sam could be seen gazing forlornly out over the cloud ocean.
Between the hijackings and smugglings, the Captain of the Berry was a man to be reckoned with. He was a man of honor, no doubt about it. He never killed unless he needed to, preferring to give his foes a chance to cut their losses and save their necks. He beat Brown Bernard Hawkins, whose deadeye flintlock left Cid nearly dead and carrying a limp ever since, half to death with the butt of his
‘Chester. Sam’s face was ruddy with bourbon, but he had let Hawkins go, with enough provisions to reach land.
Saving lives was a costly
habit, one Albion would later confer to his own crew. A pirate didn’t leave a foe alive to come kill him later. Albion himself took the brunt of Sam’s drunken wrath more than once, by sharp word or heavy fists. Albion never shook the feeling each time Captain Sam set a looted freighter crew loose, errant and vengeful, of the man making up for some past sin.
The breaking point came somewhere over the Australian outback. Captain Sam was mum over all his black moods, yet the mood gripping him one dry, baked run from Melbourne to a small outpost in aborigine territory left him tight-lipped and twitchy, prone to snapping at loud, sudden noises. The hold held nothing particularly gruesome, just a perfectly legal engine for heating and cleaning water, some medical supplies, and boxes of colorful trinkets for trade with the natives.
Albion was seventeen, had his air legs and was given charge of securing the hold.
Years
of Auntie’s hale food and plying the saucy skies had stretched him out, packed on some hard cords of muscle and browned his skin. Yet, if a person could see a photogram of Albion at eleven and Albion at fourteen, they would recognize the look of hunted insecurity at once. Sam could take the boy out of the Walled City, but the Walled City had tunneled a rat’s nest inside the boy. He was still expecting the Syndicate men to come find him with their cleavers and melon knives, or worse yet, his true father to appear to drag him into the dank passages.
Even in the darkness of the
Berry’s
hold, the outback heat swept over Albion in waves. Delicate goods were usually packed in sawdust or barrels of water, leaving little need to insulate the hold itself. The engines churned gallons of steam into nourishing moisture, but Cid had imposed water rationing to ensure the
Berry
would not run dry somewhere in the ‘uncivilized backwater of the world.’ The two weeks they had already put in were a dry hell of no cold showers and just enough drink to keep a person alive. Sitting in the shafts of light slanting through slats in the bulkhead, Albion felt a little like a smoked fish.
“I know we’re delivering pickles. The settlers won’t miss a little brine off the top,” Albion desperately reasoned, and began climbing the interminable pile of sundry in search of something to splash on his neck. The pile was lashed down well, he had done it himself, but quite tall and packed together like a puzzle. The barrels of foodstuffs were at the top. When Albion reached them, he used a crowbar to pry open the lid, only to discover little jars of brown sick packed in sawdust, bone-dry.
“Branston pickle!” He made it a curse. It was actually one of his favorite foodstuffs, but the disappointment was a little much in the oven of a hold.
Albion did not know how close he had come to the new
occupants in the hold, not until the voices began to ripple through. He could actually see the dust motes quiver a split second after he heard them.
“You are not truly going through with this?” Cid’s voice was the first to drift through.
“We’re doing this, and I won’t have ye bickering over the right of it, ye hear?”
Captain Sam’s words were like ice- it chilled the parched Albion to the bone.
“Think it over Sam. Don’t pretend for a second you aren’t thinking of the
Kyushu Maru
every living moment of the day. I see you perched on the deck, looking east as if you can bring them back out of the sun.”
“It was war, Cid. I did what my country needed- I sent those folks into the Lands Beyond to chart the way. They never reached home, and America stayed out of the Great War.”
“’Folks’ now? Not squint-eyes?” There was a pause. Cid continued. “You could have put them down on any old Pacific island, told the top brass anything you wanted. They would have believed you, Captain Samuel J. Clemens of the Ninety-First Eagles.”
“Do NOT call me that, ye old limey son of a whore,” Sam hollered. Cid took no notice.
“What you’re about to do is a great deal worse, do you understand? Those people had a chance. They might have been able to fly through the ball lightning, evaded the giant cormorants, blimey, even threaded the coral pillars and whatever else those god-forsaken lands hold.”