Space Magic (17 page)

Su reported this development to Zhang, and a moment later her spirit eyes saw men with heavy crossbows charging to the defense. But they were too late. Under the protection of the hide-covered roofs, the first of the fork-carts had reached the walls. Thick braids of twisted rope sent wooden levers—each twice as long as a man and tipped with a three-tined iron fork—snapping down onto the town’s earthen walls like the striking claw of a great tiger. Two or three such blows were sufficient to bring down a large chunk of wall. Though Zhang’s bowmen fired rapidly into the gap, killing many of the invaders, more and more of Yao’s conscript soldiers were pouring over the moat. They soon began swarming over their comrades’ bodies, through the gaps in the wall, and into the town.

“Fall back!” Zhang ordered his lieutenants when Su told him the walls had been breached. Then he turned back to Su. “We too must retreat.” She found herself leaning heavily on his arm as they hurried out of the magistrate’s hall.

Zhang and Su moved in the midst of a flood of screaming, panicked townspeople, heading for the garrison where the town’s west wall met the mountains. The sturdy little building was not a castle, barely even a fort, but it was the most defensible structure in the town and it was large enough to hold all of Zhang’s troops.

But when they arrived, they found fewer than two hundred soldiers. “We have been taking very heavy casualties,” reported a lieutenant whose head was bandaged up with a blood-soaked rag. “The Wu men fight like trapped rats.”

“Let in five hundred civilians,” said Zhang, “then bar the door.”

While Zhang and the three lieutenants who had made it to the garrison prepared to make a last stand, Su sagged exhausted and worthless in a corner. She was too drained to send her spirit out again, and she would be no use whatsoever in a fight. All she could do was prepare her spirit for the afterlife.

But when she had finished her prayers, the final attack had still not come. “What is he waiting for?” she asked Zhang.

“I do not know,” he said. They pressed through crowds of terrified civilians and wounded soldiers to the outer room, where splintered furniture blocked the garrison’s only door, and peered out an arrow slit.

Outside, mobs of Yao’s troops crowded the street, but they had left an open space in front of the garrison. Yao himself stood in that space, his rhinoceros-hide surcoat stained with soot and blood. “Does Zhang yet live?” he called out.

“I live,” Zhang called back, though he stood to the side of the arrow slit in case one of Yao’s sharpshooters should make an attempt to change that. Su moved to another slit nearby, unable to take her eyes off of Yao.

“I would like to make you an offer,” Yao replied. “You have a Xian priestess with you. Do not deny it, I can smell her. Give the bitch to me, and I will allow you and your men to live.”

Zhang looked at Su, his expression unreadable, but he called back, “We would prefer to die, rather than live under Wu rule.”

Yao gave a swift curt nod that indicated he had expected no other response. “I will give you until dawn to reconsider your decision.” He raised his voice. “My offer applies to anyone in the building. Send out the Xian priestess, and all your lives will be spared.”

Su’s knees gave way. She slid down the wall, collapsing like a horse that has been ridden too far. But Zhang stood tall, and spoke in a general’s voice. “You will not be surrendered,” he said to Su, and stared around at the soldiers and civilians who crowded the room. “This I promise.”

The sun crept downward, and slipped below the horizon, but the garrison with its mass of people grew no cooler; Su blinked stinging sweat from her eyes as she prayed with a freshly-widowed civilian and her three small children. Then, when the prayer was done, she slipped her bracelet from her wrist. “This is a special charm,” she whispered to the middle child. “It is supposed to be a secret. But now... I suppose there is little reason to hide it any longer.” She spoke a word of power, and cool mountain air flowed from the bracelet.

The children gasped and cooed in pleasure, pressing their faces into the breeze, and the young widow smiled at their happiness. But then the youngest reached out for the shiny bauble, and thrust her tiny hand through the shimmering loop all the way up to the elbow. Su gasped at the memory of Yao’s severed hand, but the panic lasted only a moment; she had dabbled her own fingers through the bracelet into the cool air beyond many times. It was only at the moment the charm was invoked that it was so dangerous. Still, magic was always unpredictable, and she gently grasped the child’s arm and drew it back out of the bracelet.

The infant’s face bunched up as though to cry, but then relaxed into an expression of curiosity and wonder as she stared at her own hand, tightly clenched in a fist. Then the tiny fingers opened.

Su too looked on in wonder.

Sparkling in the child’s palm was a tiny handful of... snow.

“General Zhang!” Su called as she hurried to his quarters. “General Zhang! I must speak with the armorer immediately!”

Luck was with her: the armorer was among the survivors. But after he had inspected the bracelet, he shook his head and handed it back to her. “I am sorry, priestess,” he said. “If it were iron, I might be able to enlarge it as you request. But bronze is not so malleable.”

Su’s spirits, so recently raised, fell hard.

“Still...” said the armorer, tugging on his beard, “though the bracelet cannot be hammered out, perhaps the spell can be. What do you know of its construction?”

“It partakes of the Circle of Heaven, of course, and the power of the Dragon of the West, but my own memories are the focus of the charm. It will not work unless I am touching the bracelet.”

“Hmm. The Dragon can be invoked with the appropriate herbs, perhaps, but the Circle...”

Su, Zhang, and the armorer talked for a long time, while the torches burned down and were replaced. Soldiers came and went, calling out watches at intervals. Finally, at the beginning of the last watch before dawn, they agreed that no better plan could be devised.

“It will be dangerous,” advised the armorer. “The Dragon of the West is not easily tamed.”

“I understand,” said Su.

Zhang’s expression was serious. “Those who form the circle must remain behind. I cannot ask you to do this.”

Su matched Zhang’s gaze with her own. “I have no choice,” she said. “The charm is tied to me. All I ask is that you give me a sharp knife, so that I may choose the moment of my death.”

Zhang held Su’s gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes and bowed his head. Without a word, he drew the sheathed knife from his own belt and handed it to her. She bowed to him as she accepted it.

“Come,” said the armorer. “We have little time.”

They lit incense, and burned herbs, and spilled wine upon the ground. And then Su found herself kneeling before a large stone, trembling as though from cold though the night was still sweltering.
Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa
, she prayed, as she held out her bracelet in her two hands and placed it on the stone.

The armorer set his chisel on the bracelet, just where the Dragon of the West’s tail entered its mouth. “When you are ready,” he said quietly, and raised his mallet, awaiting her signal.

Su looked into his eyes, and took a deep breath. Then she gave a fierce nod, and as the armorer brought his mallet down she spoke a word of power.

The bracelet shimmered and tingled between her fingers for a moment before the metal parted.

“Ah!” Su cried out, as cold fire burned along her arms and across her chest. It was as though she hugged a huge, invisible tree of ice—her arms were forced into a circle by the pressure of the spell, and a cold blast of air blew upward into her face. But though the broken bracelet seared her fingers with its chill, she held on.

Then she felt warm fingers on her hands. It was Chen, Zhang’s youngest surviving lieutenant. All the lieutenants had volunteered for this duty, but Zhang had insisted that the skills of the other two could not be lost. Chen held tightly to Su’s trembling hands, his face impassive.

“I... I will release my left hand,” Su said through chattering teeth, and Chen shifted his grip so that his right hand held Su’s left and his left grasped the bracelet.

“I am ready,” said Chen.

Su squeezed her eyes tightly shut and let go with her left hand.

Then she screamed, as a burning-cold wall of wind forced her arms apart. Chen cried out at the same time, but he held her left hand with a firm grip.

Su opened her eyes. Her arms and Chen’s formed a nearly circular loop, the two of them grasping the broken bracelet on one side and each other’s hands on the other. Looking down, though her eyes watered from the chill wind, she saw—not her own feet and Chen’s, but a pure unmarked patch of snow. “It’s working!” she gasped.

Two more volunteers joined the circle. Soldiers. One cursed as the cold seared his hands; the other only clenched his jaw. The circle was now nearly a man’s height across.

Chen and the man to his right now lowered themselves to one knee and dropped their joined hands to the floor, while Su and the fourth man raised the bracelet as high as they could. The circle was now a tilted ellipse, and the fierce wind pouring out of it whipped the clothing of the men nearby.

“Go!” Zhang yelled into the gale. “Civilians first, then soldiers! Officers last! Hurry!”

Women and children stepped over Chen’s hand and ducked under Su’s, squinting against the wind and gasping as their bare feet touched the snow. But they pressed ahead, driven by the knowledge that Yao would soon attack. Old men followed, and more women, some carrying babies and leading children. The warmth of their bodies as they passed eased Su’s chattering teeth, a little, and they stepped through the circle quickly and in good order, but as the civilians went on and on Su’s trembling began to shake her entire body.

Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa
, she prayed, not knowing how much longer she could hold on.

Then a warm weight settled on her shoulders. It was a horse blanket, and it stank, but it helped immensely. She looked over her shoulder and saw Zhang placing another blanket on the man to her left.

The parade of women, children, and men continued. Ice caked in the folds of the blanket, and Su’s hands ached from the cold.
Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa
.

Her prayers were interrupted by Zhang’s harsh, commanding voice. “This is too slow!” he said, and placed his hand on the bracelet.

“No!” Su cried out, but it was too late—Zhang had inserted himself into the circle.

“Two by two!” he yelled, and the civilians complied, walking two abreast from the heat and dust of Guang-xi into the cold and snow of the Xian mountains.

“Zhang, how could you?” Su called to him across the endless flow of heads and shoulders. “You cannot remain behind. The people need you!”

“The people need me now,” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. Snow was already accumulating in his beard. “And I could not allow myself to live, knowing that my brave priestess stayed behind to save me.”

Su’s head bowed, and her knees sagged. “Oh, Zhang...” The cold bit through the heavy horse blanket, and she began to tremble anew.

And then, impossibly, Zhang began to chuckle.

“What do you find funny in this situation?” she demanded of him.

“It reminds me of when I was a child,” he said. “Do you know ‘Little Mousey Brown’?”

Shivering, Su just looked at him.

“It is a circle dance the Li children do. You hold hands in a circle, and dance around, and sing.” And then he opened his mouth, and in a frog-like bass he began to sing:

“He climbed up the candlestick,

The little mousey brown,

To steal and eat tallow,

And he couldn’t get down.”

To her own astonishment, Su recognized the rhyme, though she hadn’t thought of it in years. She began to swing her arms gently back and forth as she joined Zhang in the second verse:

“He called for his grandma,

But his grandma was in town,

So he doubled up into a wheel,

And rolled himself down.”

She was nearly unable to finish the verse, she was laughing so hard. Laughing like a child in the snows of Xian. “Yes, we had this rhyme in Xian,” she gasped. “And at the end, when the mousey
roooolled
himself down, we would all...”

She stopped.

“Would what?” asked Zhang.

She explained how the Xian version of the dance ended. “Do you think...”

“I don’t know.” Zhang’s face grew thoughtful. “We can try.”

Newly invigorated, the circle waited while the last of the civilians stepped through and the first of the soldiers followed them. Soon only a handful of soldiers and one lieutenant remained in the wind-whipped room. But then the last two scouts hurried in and barred the door behind themselves. “Yao has broken through the blockade!” said one, sweat running down his face.

“He will find a surprise,” said Zhang. “Go!”

The scout ducked under Su and Zhang’s hands, joined at the bracelet, and vanished into the snow. “Good luck,” said the lieutenant as he followed, leaving the room empty save for the circle of five and the whistling wind.

Their isolation did not last long. A moment later came a heavy thud at the barred door, and the latch splintered.

“Shall we roll ourselves down?” said Zhang, but though his words were light his expression was serious. None of them knew what the consequences of their action might be.

“Yes,” said Su, and raised the bracelet high. “Let us roll ourselves down.”

A second thud, and the door crashed into pieces.

The man opposite the bracelet took a deep breath and, without releasing his grip on either side, ran under Su and Zhang’s hands.

The circle turned itself inside-out.

Su felt as though she, herself, were turning inside-out.

The last thing she saw in the garrison of Guang-xi was Yao’s face, livid with anger, his hair blown back by the wind from Xian.

And then she found herself standing in the snow—in a cold but gentle breeze. A natural, not supernatural, cold. The sun was just rising, causing the trampled snow to steam gently.