Dead Man’s Hand (49 page)

There was also rage, and fear. He could not understand how men who joked and drank
and collapsed into fits of laughter over some bawdy tale could suddenly become automata,
like interchangeable gears in a machine that they did not comprehend, and become as
will-less as the guns in their hands. When the right orders were given, all men could
murder in cold blood like devils.

Amos got up and walked west, hiding from anything that looked like an army patrol,
until he had left behind the world of cities and laws and the men who crafted them
and submitted to their power.

Was it not the world of strictly construed laws and glittering money and elegant clothes
and refined speeches that had decided one man could be the property of another?
Amos remembered.
And it was that same world that had declared ritualized, anonymous slaughter sweet
and fitting. It was that same world that would abandon the wounded, knowing what fate
awaited them. What was the use of talk of freedom and ideals? Civilization was a lie,
through and through.

And so he moved ever westward, searching for and escaping into the trail-less, wordless
wilderness beyond the frontier line.

* * *

“I don’t care what you did or didn’t do,” Yun said. “What matters is you’re here now.”

An owl hooted not too far away, startled from its perch.

“They’re coming,” Amos said. “We better get ready.”

He had already decided that the best spot for defense was between two fallen trees
near the top of the hill. It would give them some cover and allow them to see the
men approach.

“Get me there first,” Yun said, pointing to the conical shelter made out of sticks.

“It’s not gold you need right now.”

“It’s not gold I’m after,” Yun said impatiently. “It’s words. Magic.”

Amos had no choice but to help her over. Her legs were unsteady and her breathing
was labored as they walked. She leaned into him, as light as a foal.

“Open it up,” she said. There was a natural authority to the way she spoke, as though
she really was used to giving commands and having them obeyed.

Amos peeled back the branches to reveal a few wooden boxes underneath, on top of which
lay a few bundles wrapped in oilcloth. Yun pointed at those. Amos handed them to her.

She unwrapped the bundles. They were filled with all kinds of printed material: pages
torn from books, sheets of newsprint, picture cards with words on their backs.

Though worried about the approaching pursuers, Amos was intrigued. “What are they?”

She stroked the papers lovingly. “Another kind of treasure. Probably the better kind.
Words I’ve read and liked.”

She picked up a page from the top and handed it to him. “I’m tired. Read it to me.”

By the faint light of the moon, Amos read:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed
desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to
console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

“Wise words,” she said.

“Wise words are not enough,” he said, thinking of all the ugliness in the world.

“Are they not?” And before he could stop her, she snatched the page out of his hand,
tore it into tiny pieces, and began to eat some of them.

“What are you doing?” He stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I am in
desperate country
,” she said, after swallowing, “and I need all the
bravery
I can get. But I will have nothing of
resignation
.” She spat out a wad of wet pulp.

And he saw a hardened set to her jaw that was new, and heard a strength in her voice
that had been absent before. She seemed literally to have grown bolder.

“You read but do not believe,” she said.

“You do not know what I have seen,” he said. He thought of that young man long ago
who had believed himself to be brave and noble until the truth was revealed to him.

She laughed. “I have seen words free the minds of men who thought they were slaves.”

* * *

YUN (1885)

The men who had rescued her brought her back to Tienching, the Heavenly City, capital
of the Heavenly State, where she became a soldier just like all the other Taiping
women. She was bright and worked hard, and soon she was selected to study how to read
and write.

Her teacher, Sister Wen, was a former prostitute who had learned to read and write
from her clients in Canton. She freely admitted that she did not know how to write
like the scholars, only like a child. “But the magic of writing is strongest in the
least skilled,” she said, “just as in the Bible it is the last that shall be first,
and the first last.”

Sister Wen wrote the characters for the Heavenly State of Taiping on a slate.

“This is the character
tien
, which means ‘heaven,’” she said, pointing to the third character. “It is like a
man standing with a beam over his head, which he must keep balanced over him.”

This made sense to Yun. It was her old life. A man was weighed down by the world of
his superiors, and a woman’s burden was even heavier. Looking at the character, she
could almost see the person’s back bend with the weight.

“It has been written this way for thousands of years, but no more.” Sister Wen erased
the line at the top and redrew it, so that it tilted like the man was throwing off
his weight.

“
Tienwang
decided that we can write ‘heaven’ like this, and already you can hear the Emperor
in Peking quaking with fear.”

Yun looked at the character on the slate and felt her heart beat faster.

But still, she doubted.

“How can we just change it?” she asked. “Hadn’t our ancestors always written
tien
the old way?”

“Our ancestors are dead,” Sister Wen said. “But we are alive. If we want something,
then we must take it and make it true. Have you ever known poor women like you and
me to read and write, to fight with swords and arrows next to their brothers and fathers?
Yet here we are.”

Yun could almost see the invisible strands of power rise from the slate into the hearts
of all the men and women around her.

“If we wish to express that which has never been thought, we must create new characters.
There will be no more concubines, no more bound feet, no more rich and poor, and no
more shaved foreheads and queues to show our submission to the Manchu Emperor. We
will be free.”

And Yun felt the ground tremble under her, and she was sure that the tremors could
be felt in far away Peking.

* * *

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

She chewed on the words and swallowed them.

“I saw a single character shake the foundation of an Empire,” she said to Amos. “And
you dare tell me that words are mere words. Now, eat.”

She handed him a slip of paper.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his
fate.

He ate it, masticating the bitter pulp slowly.

She looked at him. “You could have left me to those men. Yet you stayed. Doesn’t matter
if you want to be. You
are
a
hsiake
.”

A wave of heat rose from his stomach and suffused his body, gradually seeping even
into his limbs and extremities. He felt as though he had the strength of many men
flowing through him.

“Now, you see,” she said, her voice strong as a Douglas fir.

* * *

AMOS

As the shadowy figures crossed the stream, Amos fired his first shot. It hit the water
near the leader and made a big splash, the water glinting white in the moonlight.

“Go back!” Amos shouted.

The man in the lead—Pike—swore. “I told you to mind your own business, stranger!”

“There’s been enough killing,” Amos said.

“It’s her hoard, isn’t it? What did she promise you? Don’t be foolish. We can take
it all, together, and pay you your share.”

The stream, reflecting the moon, gave him light to aim by. Amos shot again, closer
to Pike’s feet. The men scrambled back onto the bank of the stream, fell back among
the trees, and returned fire. In the darkness, their shots thudded into the fallen
trees Amos and Yun hid behind, and bits of bark and dirt rained down around them.

“Foolish,” Yun said. “They’re wasting bullets.”

“They’re wiser than you think,” Amos said. He showed her a handful of brass cartridges.
“These are all I’ve left. If they keep on drawing my fire, I’ll run out before they
do.”

Yun shuffled through the papers in her bundles. “Here, I knew this would come in handy.”

Amos saw that she was holding a small poster showing a colored drawing of a Fourth
of July celebration. Someone was making a speech. In the background, fireworks filled
the night sky.

Yun flipped the poster over: the words to the
Star Spangled Banner
.

She tore the paper into strips, wet the strips with her mouth, and wrapped a few of
the words around the cartridges:
red glare
,
bombs
,
rocket
.

Silently, Amos loaded the cartridges. The added bulk of the paper seemed to not hinder
the smooth slide of metal on metal, but he was afraid that the doctored cartridges
would misfire.

Muttering a prayer, he aimed and fired.

The first shot exploded into a bright ball of red fire in the woods on the other side
of the stream. Pike’s men yelped and rolled on the ground to put out the flames on
their clothes.

The next shot turned into a series of explosions that was so loud and bright that
Amos was temporarily blind and deaf.

The return fire from the woods ceased.

“They’re not dead,” Yun said. “But this will stun them and make them think twice about
shooting. Maybe they’ll be more reasonable in the morning.”

“I suppose we’re safe for the time being,” said Amos, still not quite believing what
he had seen.

Satisfied, she sang in a low voice:

“Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”

Amos settled in for the standoff.

“Tell me,” he said, “what happened to
your
rebellion?”

* * *

YUN (1860)

The Taiping armies were invincible. Wherever they went, the Emperor’s forces fell
back like sheep before wolves. Half of China now belonged to the rebels.
Tienwang
spoke of sending emissaries to France and Britain, fellow Christian nations that
would come to the Heavenly State’s aid.

But, gradually, rumors began to spread of how the commanders and generals had taken
concubines and hoarded treasure for their own use, even
Tienwang
himself. While food was still plentiful in the capital, stories described men and
women starving in far away provinces, just like they had under the Manchu Emperor.
There was even talk of how the other Christian nations said
Tienwang
was a heretic, and they would support the heathen Manchus, who were amenable to European
demands for concessions, and not the Taiping.

The Taiping armies began to lose battles.

Now a general herself, Yun steadfastly refused to believe those stories. She was always
the first to lead a charge and the last to retreat. She kept none of the conquered
goods but shared them all with her sisters and brothers. She prayed and preached,
and taught everyone in her army how to write
tien
with a tilted roof.

Still, the convoys of supply wagons from the Heavenly City dwindled, and streams of
refugees stole away from the Taiping territories at night like rats leaving a burning
building. Yun noticed that the banners of the other commanders were becoming tattered,
their character for ‘heaven’ drooping, falling back into the old ways.

One night, Sister Wen came to her tent in the middle of the night and woke Yun.

It had been a few years since Yun had last seen her teacher, who had stayed behind
in the capital. She was startled to see how white the older woman’s temples had grown
and how stooped her once-straight back had become.