Ice and Fire: Chung Kuo Series (16 page)

DeVore smiled tightly. ‘That’s fine. But you’ll let her go now, neh? You’ll explain
that it was all a mistake.’

Peskova’s mouth opened marginally then closed without a sound. Bowing deeply, and
with one last, brief look at the albino, he turned and left, to do at once what the
Overseer had
ordered.

‘Why did you tell him that?’

DeVore turned and looked at Lehmann’s son. He was eighteen, but he seemed ageless,
timeless. Like death itself.

‘To make him do as I say, not as he thinks he should do.’

‘And the woman?’

DeVore smiled into that empty, mask-like face. He had no need to answer. The boy knew
already what would happen to the woman.

The moon was huge and monstrous in the darkness: a full, bright circle, like a blind
eye staring down from nothingness. Si Wu Ya looked up at it and shivered, anxious
now.
Then, as the rope tightened again, tugging at her, she stumbled on, the tops of her
arms chafing where the rope bit into them.

Ahead of her Sung was whimpering again. ‘Be quiet!’ she yelled, angry with him for
his weakness, but was rewarded with the back of Teng’s hand. Then Teng was standing
over her,
his breathing heavy and irregular, a strange excitement in his face. Groaning, the
pain in her lower body almost more than she could bear, she got to her feet, then
spat blood, unable to put her
hand up to her mouth to feel the damage he had done to her.

Ahead lay the water-chestnut fields, glimmering in the reflected light from Chung
Kuo’s barren sister.

We are cursed
, she thought, staggering on, each step sending a jolt of pain through her from arse
to abdomen.
Even Teng and Chang. Even Peskova and that bastard Bergson. All cursed.
Every last one of us. All of us fated to go this way; stumbling on in darkness, beneath
the gaze of that cold, blind eye.

She tried to laugh but the sound died in her before it reached her lips. Then, before
she realised it, they had stopped and she was pushed down to the ground next to Sung,
her back to him.

She lay there, looking about her, the hushed voices of the four men standing nearby
washing over her like the senseless murmur of the sea.

Smiling, she whispered to her husband, ‘The sea, Sung. I’ve never seen the sea. Never
really seen it. Only on vidcasts…’

She rolled over and saw at once that he wasn’t listening. His eyes were dark with
fear, his hands, bound at his sides like her own, twitched convulsively, the fingers
shaking
uncontrollably.

‘Sung…’ she said, moved by the sight of him. ‘My sweet little Sung…’

She wanted to reach out and hold him to her, to draw him close and comfort him, but
it was too late now. All her love for him, all her anguish welled up suddenly, overwhelming
her.

‘Kuan yin!’ she said softly, tearfully. ‘Oh, my poor Sung. I didn’t mean to be angry
with you. Oh, my poor, poor darling. I didn’t mean…’

Teng kicked her hard in the ribs, silencing her.

‘Which one first?’

The voice was that of the simpleton, Seidemann. Si Wu Ya breathed slowly, deeply,
trying not to cry out again, letting the pain wash past her, over her; trying to keep
her mind clear of it. In
case. Just in case…

She almost shook her head; almost laughed. In case of what? It was done with now.
There was only pain ahead of them now. Pain and the end of pain.

Peskova answered. ‘The woman. We’ll do the woman first.’

She felt them lift her and take her over to the low stone wall beside the glimmering
field of water-chestnuts.
The woman,
she thought, vaguely recognizing herself in the words.
Not Si
Wu Ya now, no longer Silk Raven, simply ‘the woman’
.

She waited, the cold stone of the wall pushed up hard against her breasts, her knees
pushing downward into the soft, moist loam, while they unfastened the rope about her
arms. There was a
moment’s relief, a second or two free of pain, even of thought, then it began again.

Teng took one arm, Chang the other, and pulled. Her head went down sharply, cracking
against the top of the wall, stunning her.

There was a cry followed by an awful groan, but it was not her voice. Sung had struggled
to his feet and now stood there, only paces from where the Overseer’s man, Peskova
was standing, a
big rock balanced in both hands.

Sung made a futile struggle to free his arms, then desisted. ‘Not her,’ he pleaded.
‘Please, gods, not her. It’s me you want. I’m the thief, not her. She’s
done nothing. Nothing. Kill me, Peskova. Do what you want to me, but leave her be.
Please, gods, leave her be…’ His voice ran on a moment longer, then fell silent.

Teng began to laugh, but a look from Peskova silenced him. Then, with a final look
at Sung, Peskova turned and brought the rock down on the woman’s upper arm.

The cracking of the bone sounded clearly in the silence. There was a moment’s quiet
afterwards, then Sung fell to his knees, vomiting.

Peskova stepped over the woman and brought the heavy stone down on the other arm.
She was unconscious now. It was a pity, that; he would have liked to have heard her
groan again, perhaps even to
cry out as she had that night when The Man had played his games with her.

He smiled. Oh, yes, they’d all heard that. Had heard and found the echo in themselves.
He looked across at Sung. Poor little Sung. Weak little Sung. All his talk meant nothing
now. He was
powerless to change things. Powerless to save his wife. Powerless even to save himself.
It would be no fun killing him. No more fun than crushing a bug.

He brought the stone down once again; heard the brittle sound of bone as it snapped
beneath the rock. So easy it was. So very, very easy.

Teng and Chang had stepped back now. They were no longer necessary. The woman would
be going nowhere now. They watched silently as he stepped over her body and brought
the stone down once again,
breaking her other leg.

‘That’s her, then.’ Peskova turned and glanced at Sung, then looked past him at Seidemann.
‘Bring him here. Let’s get it over with.’

Afterwards he stood there beside the wall, staring at Sung’s body where it lay, face
down on the edge of the field of water-chestnuts.
Strange
, he thought.
It was just like a
machine. Like switching off a machine.

For a moment he looked out across the water meadow, enjoying the night’s stillness,
the beauty of the full moon overhead. Then he heaved the stone out into the water
and turned away,
hearing the dull splash sound behind him.

Chapter 39

CASTING A SPELL OUT OF ICE

K
im lay on his back in the water, staring up at the ceiling of the pool. Stars hung
like strung beads of red and black against the dull gold
background, the five sections framed by Han pictograms. It was a copy of part of the
ancient Tun Huang star map of
AD
940. According to the Han it was the earliest accurate
representation of the heavens; a cylindrical projection that divided the sky into
twenty-eight slices – like the segments of a giant orange.

There was a game he sometimes played, floating there alone. He would close his eyes
and clear his mind of everything but darkness. Then, one by one, he would summon up
the individual stars from
within a single section of the Tun Huang map; would set each in its true place in
the heavens of his mind, giving them a dimension in time and space that the inflexibility
– the sheer
flatness – of the map denied them. Slowly he would build his own small galaxy of stars.
Then, when the last of them was set delicately in place, like a jewel in a sphere
of black glass, he
would try to give the whole thing motion.

In his earliest attempts this had been the moment when the fragile sphere had shattered,
as if exploded from within; but experiment and practice had
brought him beyond that point. Now he could make the sphere expand or contract along
the dimension of time; could trace each separate star’s unique and unrepeated course
through the
nothingness he had created within his skull. It gave him a strong feel for space –
for the relationships and perspectives of stars. Then, when he opened his eyes again,
he would see –
as if for real – the fine tracery of lines that linked the bead-like stars on the
Tun Huang map, and could see, somewhere beyond the dull gold surface, where their
real positions lay –
out there in the cold, black eternity beyond the solar system.

Kim had cleared his mind, ready for the game, when he heard the doors at the far end
of the pool swing open and the wet slap of bare feet on the tiles, followed moments
later by a double splash.
He knew without looking who it was, and when they surfaced, moments later, close to
him, acknowledged them with a smile, his eyes still closed, his body stretched out
in the water.

‘Daydreaming?’ It was Anton’s voice.

‘That’s right,’ he said, assuming a relaxed, almost lazy tone of voice. He had told
no one of his game, knowing how the other boys responded to the least sign of eccentricity.
Both Anton and Josef were some three years older than he and shared a tutorial class
with him, so knew how brilliant he was; but brilliance inside the classroom was one
thing, how one behaved
outside it was another. Outside they took care to disguise all sign of what had brought
them here.

At times Kim found this attitude perverse. They should be proud of what they were
– proud of the gifts that had saved them from the Clay. But it was not so simple.
At the back of it they
were ashamed. Ashamed and guilty. They had survived, yes, but they knew that they
were here on sufferance. At any moment they could be cast down again, into darkness.
Or gassed, or simply put to
sleep. That knowledge humbled them; bound them in psychological chains far stronger
than any physical restraint. Outside the classroom they were rarely boastful.

Josef sculled backwards with his hands, his head tilted back, his knees bent, experimenting
with his balance in the water. ‘Are you going to see the film tonight?’

Kim lifted his head and looked back at his friend, letting his feet drift slowly down.
He was nine now but, like all of them, much smaller, lither than normal boys his age.
He combed his hair
back with his fingers, then gave his head a tiny shake. ‘What film is it?’

Anton laughed. ‘What do you think?’

‘Ah…’ Kim understood at once. They had been joking about it only yesterday. ‘Pan Chao…’

Pan Chao! It sometimes seemed as if half the films ever made had been about Pan Chao!
He was the great hero of Chung Kuo – the soldier turned diplomat turned conqueror.
In
AD
73 he had been sent, with thirty-six followers, as ambassador to the King of Shen
Shen in Turkestan. Ruthlessly defeating his rival for influence, the ambassador from
the Hsiung Nu,
he had succeeded in bringing Shen Shen under Han control. But this, his first triumph,
had been eclipsed by what had followed. Over the next twenty-four years, by bluff
and cunning and sheer force
of personality, Pan Chao had brought the whole of Asia under Han domination. In
AD
97 he had stood on the shore of the Caspian Sea, an army of 70,000 vassals gathered
behind
him, facing the great Ta Ts’in, the Roman Empire. The rest was history, known to every
schoolboy.

For a moment the three boys’ laughter echoed from the walls.

In the silence that followed, Kim asked, ‘Do you think he really existed?’

‘What do you mean?’ It was Anton who answered him, but he spoke for both the boys.
How could Pan Chao not have existed? Would Chung Kuo
be
Chung Kuo were it not for Pan Chao?
It would be
Ta Ts’in
instead. A world ruled by the
Hung Mao
. And such a world was an impossibility. The two boys laughed, taking Kim’s comment
for dry humour.

Kim, watching them, saw at once how meaningless such questions were to them. None
of them shared his scepticism. They had been bewitched by the sheer scale of the world
into which they had
entered; a world so big and broad and rich – a world so deeply and thoroughly embedded
in time – that it could not, surely, have been invented? So grateful were they to
have escaped the
darkness of the Clay, they were loath to question the acts and statements of their
benefactors.

No, it was more than that: they had been
conditioned
not to question it.

‘Forget it,’ he said, and realized that even in that he differed from them. They
could
forget. In fact, they found it easy to forget. But he could not. Everything – even
his mistakes – were engraved indelibly in his memory, almost as if his memory had
greater substance – was more
real
– than their own.

‘Well?’ Anton persisted. ‘Are you going to come? It’s one we haven’t seen before.
About the Fall of Rome and the death of Kan Ying.’

Kim smiled, amused, then nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll…’

He stopped.

The three boys turned in the water, looking.

The doors at the far end had swung open. Momentarily they stayed open, held there
by a tall, spindly youth with long arms, a mop of unruly yellow hair and bright blue,
staring eyes. It was
Matyas.

‘Shit!’ said Josef under his breath and ducked beneath the water.

Matyas smiled maliciously then came through, followed by two other boys, smaller,
much younger than himself. ‘Greaser’ and ‘Sucker’, Anton called them, though not in
Matyas’s hearing: names that captured not only the subservient nature of their relationship
to Matyas but also something of their physical appearance. Greaser – his real name
was Tom
– had a slick, rat-like look to him, especially in the water, while Sucker, a quiet
boy named Carl, had a small, puckered face dominated by thick, fleshy lips.

It was whispered that the two of them ‘serviced’ Matyas in a most original manner;
but how much of that was truth and how much it was influenced by Anton’s persuasively
apt
names was hard to gauge. All that was certain was that the two younger boys accompanied
Matyas everywhere; were shadow and mirror to his twisted image.

Kim watched Matyas lope arrogantly along the edge of the pool, his head lowered, an
unhealthy smile on his thin lips, until he stood across from him. There Matyas turned
and, his smile
broadening momentarily, threw himself forward into the water in an ungainly dive.

Kim glanced briefly at the two boys at his side. Like him, they had tensed in the
water, expecting trouble. But it was always difficult to know with Matyas. He was
no ordinary bully. Neither
would he have got here and stayed here had he been. No, his deviousness was part of
the fabric of his clever mind. He was a tormentor, a torturer, a master of the implicit
threat. He used physical
force only as a last resort, knowing he could generally accomplish more by subtler
means.

However, Matyas had one weakness. He was vain. Not of his looks, which, even he would
admit, tended towards ugliness, but about his intelligence. In that respect he had
been cock of the roost
until only a year ago, when Kim had first come to the Centre. But Kim’s arrival had
eclipsed him. Not at once, for Kim had been careful to fit in, deferring to the older
boy whenever they
came into contact, but as the months passed and word spread that the new boy was something
special, Kim saw how Matyas changed towards him.

Matyas surfaced directly in front of Kim, less than a forearm’s length away, and shook
his head exaggeratedly, sending the spray into Kim’s face. Then he laughed and began
to move
around him in a leisurely but awkward breaststroke. Kim turned, keeping the older
boy in front of him at all times.

‘And how’s golden boy, then?’ Matyas asked quietly, looking up and sideways, one intensely
blue eye fixing the nine-year-old.

Matyas himself was fifteen, almost sixteen. On his birthday, in a month’s time, he
would leave the Centre and begin his service in the Above, but until then he was in
a kind of limbo. He
had outgrown the Centre, yet the thought of losing his ‘position’ as senior boy both
frightened and angered him.
Ning wei chi k’ou mo wei niu hou
, the Han said –
‘Rather be the mouth of a chicken than the hindquarters of a cow’ – and so it was
with Matyas. He did not relish becoming a small fish once again – a ‘cow’s
arse’. As a result, he had been restless these last few weeks – dangerous and unpredictable,
his sarcasm tending towards open cruelty. Several times Kim had caught Matyas staring
at him
malevolently and knew the older boy would never forgive the newcomer for robbing him
– unjustly, Matyas believed – of his intellectual crown.

It was why Matyas was so dangerous just now. It was more than jealousy or uncertainty
or restlessness. He had lost face to Kim, and that loss burned in him like a brand.

Kim looked past him, noting how his followers, Tom and Carl, had positioned themselves
at the pool’s edge, crouched forward, watching things closely, ready to launch themselves
into the
water at any moment. Then he looked back at Matyas and smiled.

‘
Ts’ai neng t’ung shen
,’ he said provocatively and heard Anton, behind him, splutter with surprise.

‘Shit!’ Josef exhaled softly, off to his right. ‘That’s done it!’

Kim kept the smile on his face, trying to act as naturally as he could, but the hair
on his neck had risen and he could feel a tension in his stomach that had not been
there a moment earlier.
A golden key opens every door
, he had said playing on Matyas’ use of ‘golden’. It seemed simple enough, innocuous
enough, but the jibe was clear to them all. It was Kim to
whom doors would open, not Matyas.

It seemed a reckless thing to say – a deliberate rubbing of salt into the open wound
of Matyas’ offended pride – but Kim hoped he knew what he was doing. There was no
avoiding
this confrontation. He had half expected it for days now. That admitted, it was still
possible to turn things to his advantage. A calm Matyas was a dangerous Matyas. Infuriated,
he might prove
easier to beat. And beat him Kim must.

Matyas had turned in the water, facing him, the leering smile gone, his cheeks red,
his eyes wide with anger. Kim had been right – the words acted on him like a goad.
Without warning he
lashed out viciously with one arm, but the weight and resistance of the water slowed
his movement and made the blow fall short of Kim, who had pushed out backwards, anticipating
it.

There was a loud splash as Tom and Carl hit the water behind Kim. Without a moment’s
hesitation Anton and Josef launched themselves into Kim’s defence, striking out to
intercept the
two boys. As he backed away, Kim saw Anton plough into Carl and, even as the boy surfaced,
thrust his head savagely down into the water again before he could take a proper breath.
But that was all
he saw, for suddenly Matyas was on him, struggling to push Kim down beneath the surface,
his face blind with fury.

Kim kicked out sharply, catching Matyas painfully on the hip, then wriggled out under
him, twisting away and down. He kicked hard, thrusting himself down through the water,
then turned and
pushed up from the floor of the pool, away from the figure high above him.

For the moment Kim had the advantage. He spent far more time in the pool than Matyas
and was the better swimmer. But the pool was only so big, and he could not avoid Matyas
indefinitely. Matyas
had only to get a firm grip on him and he was done for.