Shanghai (45 page)

The Admiral smiled and responded, “The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll …”

“… and the third hour of drowsy morning name. Proud of their numbers and secure in soul, the confident and over-lusty English do the low-rated Taipingers play at billiards.”

“Very good, Mr. Hordoon. You know your Shakespeare.”

“Some. A certain Thomas De Quincy suggested it as an antidote to a bad habit of mine.”

“Interesting, Mr. Hordoon.” It was evident that the Admiral wanted to pursue the topic but decided, out of
decency—one gentleman to another—to let it go. “We'll take Nanking, Mr. Hordoon, of that you may be sure. It's just a matter of time. But during that time there's only so much building and toting to be done. Basically a siege is a matter of starvation. And a big city like Nanking can take many months to starve.”

Richard thought about another conversation on a similar ship about starvation. But that seemed a lifetime ago.

“These are also very helpful in passing the time,” the Admiral said, holding up a broad cricket bat. At first Richard assumed that the Admiral was referring to the bat as an enforcer of discipline, then he realized that the man was talking about entertaining the troops again.

Richard looked at the Admiral holding the cricket bat and said, “Is this a party or a war, sir? Surely the Taipingers will mount a counterattack against your positions both on land and sea.”

The Admiral smiled. “I doubt that.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Do you know what those are?” he said, pointing to several large cannon-like weapons that had eight narrow barrels attached together and a crank behind them. “They're called Gatling guns, and they'll change everything. A single man can now fire hundreds of rounds a minute by turning that handle. These guns will protect our heavy cannon batteries so no force on earth can get to them. With these Gatling guns as protectors, our cannon can fire day and night without fear of assault—even from that crazy brother of yours. Think of it, Mr. Hordoon: One man can kill hundreds in a few minutes. Forget about sallies from Nanking. They may try it once, but certainly not a second time.”

Richard stared at the awful thing.

“Things change, Mr. Hordoon. Things change.”

Richard found himself breathing deeply—and for the first time smelling something acrid in the air.

* * *

TWO WEEKS LATER Maxi found himself roused from his bed by Cupid, and the look on the man's bow-shaped mouth was grim.

“British,” he said, clearly. “Many British.”

Maxi threw aside his blanket and kissed his wife goodbye. Then he went to the children's room. His wife's two little girls slept in one bed, entwined, thin limbs around and through and about each other, loosed hair a combined tangle of dark beauty. He touched each of their faces, then moved to the small bed of his daughter. To his surprise, her eyes were wide open despite the early hour. When he went to kiss her she turned her head aside. Her mane of red-tinged black hair fell across her face. Her mouth that never smiled opened and closed but said nothing.

“Say goodbye to your papa.”

She turned, tears in her eyes, and said, “Come back, Papa, come back to me.”

Two hours later Maxi walked the south walls of Nanking with Cupid and three of his most experienced commanders at his side. There, arrayed like lines on a canvas, were six brigades of British troops. In their centre was a regiment of Sikhs in full battle dress. The entire assembly stood stock-still while behind them four British men-o'-war came about and positioned themselves to shell the walls of the ancient city.

“
Ta men ma shang jiu kai shi wa jue ma, xian sheng
?” asked one of his commanders.

Maxi's translator said, “Commander Wu asks if they will start digging soon.”

Maxi shook his head. Suddenly he was pleased that six weeks earlier he had ordered the building of an underground trench system attached to an oil reservoir. Only he knew that it would be the city's last line of defence.

“
Na hao, mei shi me hao pa de. Wo men de cheng qiang jian bu ke cui
.”

“He says then there is nothing to fear, as the walls of our city are strong. Unassailable.”

Maxi let out a long, low sigh. “Tell him that's not true. Look over there,” he said, pointing to the west. There the Manchu bannermen were planting stakes in the ground. “How many?” he asked.

“I count fourteen banners, sir.”

“Fourteen Manchu legions, four British men-o'-war, and at least six brigades of British troops—our walls have never been challenged by such a force.”

“But—”

“Open the evacuation tunnels out of the city for the women and children.”

Cupid took a step aside, and Maxi said, “What?”

“I already looked, sir. They've all been blocked in the night. No one in the city is leaving. Besides, the Heavenly King wouldn't permit retreat from the seat of the Heavenly Kingdom, would he?”

Maxi ignored the comment about the Taiping King, who no doubt had his own way out of the city. But it shocked him that the attackers had bothered to block routes that were clearly to be used by women, children, and elders. Maxi had made sure that the routes were narrow so that any attacker would know that they were not exit or egress routes for soldiers and armaments. They were just wide enough for a person carrying a load on his back.

“Are you sure?” Maxi asked.

“About the escape routes? Yes, sir. Two were blasted closed in the middle of the night, three others have cannon stationed facing them. They seem to have a new weapon, sir?” He pointed to the crest of a nearby hill and handed Maxi a spyglass.

Maxi looked through the glass and saw a large mounted gun with several barrels and a crank on it. He panned down to the mechanism and gasped. His keen mechanical mind quickly saw how the rotation mechanism worked the rifle barrels. He panned across the field and spotted six more of these instruments of death. Each of them was set between Nanking and the batteries of heavy cannon that were aimed at the city walls.

He was about to ask if anyone had seen these weapons work when the first of the British batteries on the north side of the city loosed a barrage of cannonballs aimed at the walls, and scrap metal aimed high over the walls to lacerate and slice and terrorize the inhabitants of the seat of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Maxi turned to see the damage caused by the first barrage and was amazed to see fires spring to life in the city. A turret on the south wall was leaning dangerously as its supporting brickwork caved in under the onslaught.

Maxi turned to Cupid and said, “Is your family safe?”

Cupid shrugged his shoulders. “Is yours?”

Maxi turned his head away from the man. Then the four men-o'-war fired all ninety-six cannons at once—and the terror grew.

For three days the English batteries thundered without let-up. The destruction in the city was manageable, but it would undoubtedly get worse with time. What took the most serious toll on the city was the lack of sleep.

Through his spyglass Maxi saw the head gunners looking at pocket watches before signalling their men to fire. Maxi surmised that some inventive person had organized it so that the cannons didn't fire in any sort of regular, repeating pattern. Instead they fired intensely, then stopped, then fired sporadically, then stopped altogether, then fired intensely again. Maxi timed the intervals and they were never the same. Someone understood that people could adapt to noise so long as it occurred in some sort of regular pattern, but random loud blasts robbed the city of Nanking of sleep. After three days without sleep, the fabric of discipline a city needed to survive a siege was already beginning to fray.

In the early evening of the fourth night of the siege Maxi gathered his most trusted men. Men with whom he'd been to war. Men who had trusted his decisions. Men who had followed him and, under his leadership, had defeated the best units of the Manchu bannermen.

Maxi tried to smile, but he was troubled. He hadn't seen those strange guns work so he didn't know exactly how to attack them. He'd sent out several small decoy parties, but none had been able to draw fire from the things. As well, most were placed far enough from the city walls that the Taiping cannon couldn't reach them.

“Sir?” It was Cupid. He was holding out Maxi's red kerchief.

“Thanks,” Maxi said, as he took the thing and put it around his neck. Then he turned to his men and said, “One more time, gentlemen—and I use the term loosely.”

A cheer went up—and Maxi finally smiled.

Maxi and his men emerged from the sewage drain and assembled along the side of the stinking cesspool. Cupid touched Maxi on the shoulder and pointed at the
sky. A large, dark cloud was moving slowly across the new moon. Maxi nodded and the word was passed. When the cloud obscured the moon they would charge the British southern battery, which continued its barrage of the city.

Maxi looked up. The edge of the cloud tipped across the point of the new moon. He tapped Cupid's shoulder and the men emerged from the tall reeds of the cesspool and crept toward the southern battery with the strange gun in front of it.

Then they were running.

Maxi felt the wind on his face, and his blood surged. His senses moved forward to his skin and his eyes became bright. A fight! He'd always loved a fight.

Four hundred yards and still no resistance.

The large black cloud completely obscured the slender moon. The lanterns from the British tents in the far distance were the only points of light in the pitchy dark.

Three hundred yards and the British hadn't spotted them. They increased their pace to an all-out sprint.

Suddenly light.

A trench of oil on his left sprang to life.

Maxi looked.
That can't be right. The trench should be in front of the battery to protect it. Not to one side. What was the point of having it to one side?

Then something spat bullets—hundreds of them pinging off rocks, whizzing past his ears, thudding sickeningly into the flesh of his men. Cupid whirled around and crashed into Maxi, his right arm almost severed from his body, a bloody blotch where his left eye should have been. Maxi held him. He took the red kerchief from his neck and wrapped it tightly around Cupid's face, trying to staunch the bleeding from the
empty eye socket. Another bullet had hit a vein, and blood was raining down.

Cupid's hot blood quickly coated Maxi's face. Through the blood he stared ahead at the thing spitting bullets. A single man stood there cranking something that fired the bullets. Behind him British officers drank beer. Some carried pool cues. All of them cheered.

Maxi looked to the fire trench and he understood why it was there to one side, not in front of the gun battery. It was there to light the scene! As though it were a play. The fire wasn't for protection, it was for illumination. His men were dying to provide entertainment for the British!

Three more slugs hit Cupid hard in the back and yanked him from Maxi's arms.

Maxi took a quick look at his old friend, then yelled to the others, “
Che! Che!
—Back! Back!” It was one of the few Mandarin words he knew, and he'd never had occasion to use it on a battlefield. But with this new weapon he had no choice.

Of his just under two hundred men, only seventeen made it back to the sewage drain. As they gathered, the dark cloud cleared the new moon, and in the thin moonlight the men saw their comrades littering the field while the British toasted the man who had cranked the strange new weapon.

Maxi felt liquid on his face. At first he thought it must be Cupid's blood, but then he realized he was wrong. It was his own tears.

—

Richard witnessed the appalling slaughter. He never saw Maxi, although after the firing stopped he ran out
on the battlefield and spotted a red kerchief on one of the dead Taipingers.

And then he heard them and looked up. Vultures. Their dark forms filled the sky, obliterating the stars. Battlefield dead always attracted carrion birds, but somehow this carnage, this open field charnel house, drew more of them than Richard had ever seen. More and bigger. It disgusted him that the British returned to their games of billiards as the great birds tore lobes of grey livers and purple strings of intestines from the dead and dying.

He reached down and retrieved the red kerchief from the body, which had been badly mutilated by the Gatling gun's large-calibre bullets. As he folded it carefully he began to think of how to get into Nanking and save his brother and his family from the inevitable bloodletting that was about to befall the capital of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Richard stood at the crest of the hill looking over the farmland to the south of the city, where Maxi's farm … had been. All that remained were the burned stubs of field crops and the lonely hearthstones of burned out farmhouses. It took Richard a while to orient himself so that he could find what remained of Maxi's farm.

Roving Manchu warriors were everywhere. On occasion a woman's cry would cut through the sound of burning. Rape was never a silent activity, and in war it was often a spectator sport. Oddly, the screams of the victims seemed to intensify the fury of the Manchus.

Richard was challenged by Manchus several times, but with his British officer's uniform and his command of Mandarin he talked himself past every checkpoint.

It wasn't until dawn that he picked up a trail from talking with two terrified farm women. They pointed to a hill to the west.

It took Richard two days to find Maxi's wife. One of her daughters had been dragged from her arms by Manchu soldiers and she hadn't been seen since; the other had been viciously raped and now hid behind her mother's skirts. Maxi's wife held their little girl in her arms as if frightened to let the child out of her grasp. But the girl just stared, seemingly unafraid, into Richard's eyes.

Maxi's wife suddenly drew in a sharp breath and pointed at Richard. It was only then Richard realized that he was wearing Maxi's kerchief around his neck. “No. No, don't think that. I didn't find his body. If anyone can stay alive in this hell it's my brother Maxi.”